According to Brian Doherty, Peter Boettke notes that, “Mises would say that a noneconomist might advocate socialism, but once you were an economist you wouldn’t. Then Oskar Lange came along and started trying to use an economic argument to defend socialism. It hit Mises and Hayek like a 2 x 4 to the head.”
There seems to be a similar pattern of belief in the idea that some on the forum seem to hold that advocates of Austrian economics are the only folks around with even the slightest bit of common sense, and that opponents, socialist opponents in particular, are always economically ignorant and often asininely stupid to an extent that approaches comedy. Of course, plenty of socialists share this belief about Austrians.
[i]“Austrians think that value comes from the subjective valuations of individuals in a market and has nothing to do with the amount of labor that goes into a product, so this must be the only way to effectively measure somethings social cost. It’s so obviously ridiculous that I don’t know why people still try to use it.”
"Well, I really don’t see the point in engaging in this debate, insofar as Austrian economics is not so much a serious theory as it is a matter of blind faith, an ideological justification of the market. Hayek, in fact, concedes the case when he says that ‘if we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic.’
As for the point about the alleged logical impossibility of preforming the calculations, complete nonsense, whoever said that evidently doesn’t have a very firm grasp of either logic or economics. If the task was logically impossible, as it is claimed, then the market couldn’t preform it anymore than a planned economy."[/i]
How many people here would react to these comments with angry or bitter resentment, insisting that they were riddled with inaccuracies, and then shoot back comments of the exact same nature at socialists and socialism? Can we perhaps acknowledge that reasonable people can disagree, that even those with harshly divergent economic viewpoints might not be mentally challenged or stupid and perhaps even admit that some might be economically informed in a general sense, even while retaining the opinion that their line of thought is economically flawed?