Saturday, July 14, 2012
Yglesias Doesn't Understand Ron Paul (or Economics)
Blogger Matt Yglesias chided Ron Paul for his alleged "obsession" with Austrian (free-market) economics, which Yglesias tried to refute without reading any Austrian works. Bestselling author Tom Woods responds.-http://youtu.be/ElDS4AohMfE
Austrian Business Cycle Theory: Answering the Critics
Tom Woods
Austrian Business Cycle Theory
Is Austrian Economics 'Unscientific'?
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Watched 2/3 of response to Yglesias. He misses the target more than he hits it.
ReplyDeleteToo much emphasis on "competition" among "entrepreneurs" and "entrepreneurs" are repeatedly construed as industrial titans who have "products" that they make strategically.
Industry doesn't exist in the USA in any significant scale, so Woods is talking about a fantasy world as described by Rand in Atlas Shrugged, not the landscape of America 2012.
He puts a lot of faith & power in "investment" and foresight used for "investment". He delivers religious reverence for those things. Assuming all humans see the world that way is the biggest flaw of the Austrians.
Yglesias is wrong everywhere because he's a sophist! He uses slippery rhetorical traps and pregnant questions that are loaded with assumptions, assumptions that are as equally fabricated and untested as those the Austrians make.
As between the Austrian view and the Yglesias view I nod toward the Austrians but they aren't exactly wise. The Austrians want to turn everyone into competitors for a dollar. They want humans to mis-use their competitive urges, not for games/sportsmanship, but for a dollar.
This same drive underlays all of the hyper-managed regulatory capitalism on display in America 2012 so I'm not really clear on why the pro-Mises gang think they've got the answer.
They've only got the answer to the question of "what is the market?"
That explanation doesn't really justify treating "the market" as a god.
Thanks, Karl.
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