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Thu Dec 14 08:06:33 2006 |
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Regarding Peter Boettke's post, I would suggest that Peter just doesn't
get it. A large proportion of members of the HES list believe that every
school of economics is ideological. From their point of view, it is
impossible to be value neutral. This makes it easy for them to evaluate
Hayek or Friedman or even Mises. They only have to place them in an
ideological camp of free market ideologues.
Mises had an answer to this. He wrote that in the evaluation of
arguments in favor of a particular government policy, one can evaluate
the policy (a) from the standpoint of whether the argument is relevant
to the goal that the arguer claims the policy will achieve (relevance of
the argument) and (b) from the standpoint of whether the deductions of
the argument are derived via a logical path from its assumptions (the
logic of the argument). Of course, some policy arguments can be ruled
out because they are not comprehensible or meaningful. He was not
discussing the latter type.
Unfortunately, this Misesian answer is not appreciated by many of the
Austrians, although I cannot speak for Peter [I have a couple of
published but apparently unconvincing papers on this.] And it certainly
is not appreciated by those who claim that all economics is ideological.
John Medaille is one of the latter. He does not understand what Mises
has in mind when Mises posits that the distinctly human mind has a
logical structure, as per one his earlier posts on this list directed at
me. If the distinctly human being does not have a mind with a logical
structure, Mises must be wrong in thinking that an argument for or
against a government policy can can be evaluated on the basis of its
logical structure. From this standpoint, it is easy for John to dismiss
Mises as merely another proponent of a free market ideology. He should
be appreciated, in my view, as a value-neutral evaluator of arguments
favoring market intervention, but that is another story.
What do you think, Peter? Does this explain why HESers seem biased
against the "conservatives" or "libertarians?"
Pat Gunning
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