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