> I do think that it is important, as a matter of > history, to get Mises right. Mises, far from > being "heterodox," represents, in my opinion, the > purest form of neoclassical orthodoxy, sort of an > orthodoxy on steroids. After all, the man who > accused his Mount Pellerian Society colleagues of > being "a bunch of socialists" deserves some > points for purity, if not for coherence. This is absolutely wrong. Mises worked out a system, right or wrong, that focused on true dynamics. To Mises neolcassical competitive equilibria are purely fictional. Mises recognized only a 'plain state of rest'- the actual results of daily trading, where competition would result in some set of actual non optimal trades. Mises reffered to competitve equilibrium as a 'final state of rest'- which he argued was completely impossible. Actual markets work in a series of plain states of rest with only some tendency towards a final state of rest. There are two points to mention here. First, changing economic conditions imply that the circumstances of the final state of rest are never the same. With perfect information on existing economic conditions we might attain a final state of rest on a given day, but we do not have this information. With unchanging conditions we might approach a final state of rest through successive trials, day after day. But with changing conditions this is utterly impossible. In other words, to Mises there is no unique and unchanging final state of rest, as depicted in mainstream models. There are only potential unseen final states of rest, which change every day, for eternity, and actual realized market trades- far from pareto optimal, but superior to anything that state planning can generate. See this link for further explanation- http://www.mises.org/story/2289 Second. The tendency towards a final state of rest derives from the action principle- we each perceive our present situation, imagine some alternative situations which we beleive to be feasible in the future, and then undertake actions to attain what we expect to be the most desirable situation out of our known alternatives. Please tell me how any of this fits in with the Neoclassical orthodoxy- which derives from the purely fictional Walrasian thought experiment. Modern orthodoxy is Walrasian and Mises, as a true evolutionary thinker, was absolutely opposed to such static equilibrium theorizing. As for the Mt Pellerin reference reference, this is irrelevant because it does not represent his thinking on economics. Mises had a very short fuse and was therefore prone behaving like a jackass. Sorting Mises out as a scholar requires one to look past his emotionally driven tirades, and to focus instead on his thought driven economic analysis. His analysis was truly brilliant, so one should make some effort to look past his obnoxious outbursts. Doing so reveals that his system was fundamentally at odds with static neoclassical theorizing. DW MacKenzie