MD: This article illustrates how poorly the Mises Monks write. It also illustrates how they analyze a problem to death … totally failing to recognize that the problem they are analyzing is totally irrelevant.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 60 of one of F.A. Hayek’s greatest essays, his 1945 lecture “Individualism: True and False,” as this essay is reprinted in Studies on the Abuse & Decline of Reason, Bruce Caldwell, ed. (2010), which is volume 13 of the Collected Works of F.A. Hayek (original emphases):
To the accepted Christian tradition that man must be free to follow his conscience in moral matters if his actions are to be of any merit, the economists added the further argument that he should be free to make full use of his knowledge and skill, that he must be allowed to be guided by his concern for the particular things of which he knows and for which he cares, if he is to make as great a contribution to the common purposes of society as he is capable of making.
MD: One sentence … 91 words … no concepts … no coherent thesis … and he mixes two fictions … religion and economics. What’s not to love about the Mises Monks. What it does seem to properly say is: A society must be very advanced for an economist to be perceived of value. No society can get large enough for an economist to “really” be of value.
Their main problem was how these limited concerns, which did in fact determine people’s actions, could be made effective inducements to cause them voluntarily to contribute as much as possible to needs which lay outside the range of their vision.
MD: See what I mean about analyzing a problem to death … a problem that is irrelevant? I guarantee you, in the olden days before anyone could even say “economist” or “christian”, someone struggling with a tree branch too large for them to place would immediately get help from another human standing by. No instruction manual, advanced inbred degree, or analysis required.
What the economists understood for the first time was that the market as it had grown up was an effective way of making man take part in a process more complex and extended than he could comprehend and that it was through the market that he was made to contribute ‘to ends which were no part of his purpose’.
MD: I wonder if the Mises Monks ever stand back and realize: It takes a very very large society indeed to find anything about the Mises Monks to be of redeeming value. If you need sand poured out of a boot, you’re sure not going to go to a Mises Monk … even in an advanced society.
DBx: Here’s Sheldon Richman on “Individualism: True and False.“