Sunday, November 27, 2005

For Mises' Sake

The latest addition to Critiques is a delightful blast at Austrians.

Tom G. Palmer savages Llewellyn Rockwell, the Ludwig von Mises Institute and Hans-Hermann Hoppe for Austrianism above and beyond the call of sanity in For Mises' Sake.

The money lines are:

"If Hoppe is the leading light of Austrian economics as the Mises Institute presents him, then Austrian economics should prepare for a long dark age. At George Mason University I saw Hoppe present a lecture in which he claimed that Ludwig von Mises had set the intellectual foundation for not only economics, but for ethics, geometry, and optics, as well. This bizarre claim turned a serious scholar and profound thinker into a comical cult figure, a sort of Euro Kim Il Sung. Hoppe's scholarship is so pitiful that one of his own colleagues -- who is still involved in the Mises Institute -- once remarked to me that Hoppe's book on ethics was a truly remarkable achievement; it was the only book he had ever read in which every step of the argument was a logical fallacy."

This has been placed in the "Libertarians Criticizing Each Other" and "Austrian Economics" indexes.