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.

3 comments:

El Gato con Bolas said...

Well, you can put the following excerpt, where Hoppe attacks Hayek's knowledge problem.


"Hayek's solution is not private property, but the decentralization of the use of knowledge.
Yet this is surely an absurd thesis. First, if the centralized use of knowledge is the problem, then it is difficult to explain why there are families, clubs, and firms, or why they do not face the
very same problems as socialism. Families and firms also involve central planning. The family head and the owner of the firm also make plans which bind the use other people can make of their private knowledge, yet families and firms are not known to share the problems of socialism."

http://www.mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae9_1_13.pdf

Fernando

Mark Plus said...

I wonder why, if monarchies supply better government than democracies, Hoppe didn't try to migrate to a country like Saudi Arabia, Swaziland or Brunei?

Econoclasta ecuatoriano said...

Hoppes' critique of Hayek is actually powerful and ultimately true.