Austrianism in the Mainstream [Running Thread]

Miscellaneous Current Events
1

I thought it may be a good idea to keep a repository on the message board of all the mainstream media outlets that mention the Austrian School. Mostly these would be mentioned on conservative, liberal, or apolitical blogs / news organizations. Usually conservatives will dismiss it as being too optimistic and as having a naive sense of human nature, liberals will dismiss it as being evil/greedy and as corporate apologetics, and usually any Statheist liberal sites we stumble across will criticize it as being “unscientific” because it doesn’t rely on positivism. I think this should be a running thread that gets updated whenever a new news source talks about it, if anything to see in what light the Austrians are being portrayed.

I’ll start. Today, a piece in Salon tried to say that Mises’ ridiculous economic ideas are infiltrating the GOP.

Help spread the word: BlueRepublican.org
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great idea, will be following

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Here’s one

http://www.economist.com/node/17522368

4

The recent Esquire bio on Ron Paul states:

Paul’s analysis leaps to the work of three refugees from totalitarian countries — Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand. All three saw pretty much any central government planning as a step on the “road to serfdom,” as Hayek put it in the title of his most famous book.

Planning was rooted in the idea of compassion, in the idea that a government had the right and even the obligation to take from the “producers” and give to people in need. Hayek and Mises showed how this led to a central bank that inflated the money supply to build grand projects or finance wars, slowly smothering freedom with the infinite ravenous blob of government. Rand popularized the movement with a novel called Atlas Shrugged, in which unions and regulation so ravage the American economy that the last producers withdraw to a hidden valley called “Galt’s Gulch” while violent starving hordes wander the countryside like escapees from a Cormac McCarthy novel.

5

Lawrence O’Donnell totally rips Rand Paul a new one. I was sympathetic to a Rothbardian outlook after studying political ideas and having an informed belief of the non-aggression principle and the definition of taxation, but gee, Lawrence O’Donnell totally didn’t strawman the libertarian position and I have no choice but to abandon my libertarian principles and become a Democrat. What an iron-clad demolishion of the idea that medical care isn’t a right in the legal sense.

6

Holy moly, that is awesome. In order to make some trivial point about Rand Paul’s use of ‘slavery,’ O’Donnell (unwittingly?) concedes that Medicare and Medicaid are largely responsible for skyrocketing health care costs. Freaking amazing.

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O’Donnell is so thick-skulled that he can’t make the connection. The AMA’s, Big Pharma’s, and the medical insurance industry’s connection with the increase in socialized medicine have nothing whatsoever to do with that increase. None.

Is sarcasm healthy?

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Why was this posted in this thread?

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Because it deals with libertarian theory. Rand Paul was making an implicit appeal to the non-aggression principle and Lawrence O’Donnell is on MSNBC (a.k.a., mainstream). If you guys want it limited to Austrian economics and not “Austro-libertarianism”, then that’s fine.

10

Well, I mean, technically it’s your thread, just from what I understood “it may be a good idea to keep a repository on the message board of all the mainstream media outlets that mention the Austrian School” and that “this should be a running thread that gets updated whenever a new news source talks about it, if anything to see in what light the Austrians are being portrayed.”

I think if we start posting every mention of a libertarian or of someone saying something about someone saying something libertarian, it will become basically useless.

11

QE2 was a bust

In the last paragraph, just out of the blue:

Economists from the so-called “Austrian” school say this is a reason to go back to a gold standard.

12

You can almost here them gagging as they write that sentence.

13

Just noticed this old one:

Interview with former Ron Paul official - mentions Mises

14

Just came across this. Oldie, but goodie. Fricking awesome actually. Not exactly sure it counts, but it had to go somewhere…

CEO of ING Insurance to Woods: Who Cares about Austria’s economy?

15

From the Huffington Post of all places:

It is in this land that a people who feel that something is not quite right are educating themselves about some truly fundamental things – Austrian economics, central banking, sound money, the relationship between the state and the financial sector, philosophy of government, individual sovereignty, the gap between laws passed today and the highest law passed in 1776, the military-industrial complex, the incompatibility between supranational institutions and democracy, and so on.

FYI this is the same guy who wrote the completely awesome “Ron Paul and the Love Revolution of 2012” piece, which is possibly the most honest piece in the mainstream I’ve ever read. And he also authored this incredibly great piece that may very well be one of the best articles to send anyone of a Leftist persuasion…which is also published on HuffPost, so you get credibility in their eyes right there.

16

Doesn’t fully count for this thread since it’s Ron Paul talking, but he’s on CNBC and mentions Austrian economics.

17

O’Donnell has a point. Cops can’t force Rand to perform medical services in regards to medicare. He still has the free will to quit practicing medicine.

He would be better off comparing the labor I do to pay for medicare as slavery.

18

Awwwwsoooommme. On Mises Blog…

John Carney at CNBC’s NetNet throws Hayek at those who can’t understand why cheap money won’t stimulate the economy. [He actually links to the mises.org online version of The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle…how badass is that?]

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About John Carney’s article.

Yes it’s nice to see Hayek and Mises.org in the MSM. I want to point out something about the article itself.

Carney is saying, and thinks Hayek is saying, that as long as inflation comes as a surpise then that’s good. By inflation he means of course higher prices, not the Austrian definition. In the old days, he says, this could be done by printing money.

But nowadays, writes Carney, it’s too late. We have come to expect higher prices. As a result, money printing may either not produce higher prices, or may increase consumer spending without increasing jobs, or may create assset bubbles, but no jobs. And all because we knew the inflation was coming.

All of which strikes me as total nonsense, and certainly not AE.

I’ll grant him that the article from Hayek does say one thing he does. If the higher prices are as expected, not higher than expected, they will not create new jobs. The idea being, I suppose, that the higher prices [=higher nominal profits] have been forseen and acted upon in advance. Whoever was supposed to be hired from this year’s higher prices has already been hired last year.

But there is a huge difference between the context of this insight in Carney’s article and in Hayek’s. Carney assumes that higher than expected prices are a GOOD THING for the economy. If only we had more and more of that magical elixir. Sadly, we have run out. But at least we have still have some inflation, [even though everyone guessed it was coming], which may have been responsible for the stabilization of the financial system.

Hayek, on the other hand, emphasizes that there is a price to pay for such a phony economy with its phony jobs. First is higher prices. Second is malinvestments, in particular the rise of companies who can only survive with constant inflation.

20

Oh yeah, Carney’s a total case of “so close, yet so far away” from any actual economic reality. But he’s saying that what the government/Fed is doing is wrong, and he’s citing Hayek and using Mises.org to do it…on CNBC.

That’s a start. I’d send him an LvMI Magnetic Bookmark for that.