Defamation is defamation. If anybody treated the LvMI, or any of its fellows like that on this forum would find their post deleted, and probably a ban after that so I don’t see why it is acceptable to treat other individuals, and organizations in such a fashion here.
Facetious playwrights with fictitious dialog are not serious threats to reputation. If you are vexed by this, ok you obviously can have emotions about this but you are exacerbating the situation by blowing it out of portion. Just treat this thread as a useless prattling of jokes and move onto the next one.
He said that an artificial reduction in the market rate of interest would be noticed by market actors, and they would deal with it. I mean, no Austrian could understand or take such confusion seriously. Rational expectations is entirely absurd.
All they are doing is changing the name of their blog. Some war.
“[A]rgument” from authority “is a bad way to argue.”
Seemed perfectly fine to me.
I wrote this for the Mises Blog: Value-Free Economics and Political Advocacy
Also, Capital Pumper, I hope you don’t mind: I took out the “libertarian wars” part in the title of this thread.
Your blog post actually reminded me of an interesting argument I had with an online acquitance. It seems that in economics when you are arguing for a specific economic policy you are inevitably also arguing for a political policy. It seems to me that Milton Friedman’s belief that politics and economics are linked (or, even one in the same, in many ways) holds true.
I don’t if anybody reads Bradford DeLong’s blog, but he did pick up on the news. He surely compressed what he thought was most important:
As of January 1, 2010, we are changing our name to “Coordination Problem”… The term “Austrian economics” has become as much a hindrance… [W]e have been tracking the use of the term Austrian economics… The results do not fit our intention. Google alert, for example, inevitably points to financial advice or libertarian politics, rarely to the research paradigm of F. A. Hayek, never to the scholarship of Israel Kirzner. Mises is often mentioned, but Mises the ideological symbol… These trends are not recent, but have been constant throughout our respective careers. We have always been among those who attempted to offer resistance to this use of the term. It has become evident to us that our efforts have been futile. Rather than resist the pure ideological identification, we are choosing to devote our efforts elsewhere. The name Austrian economics has been lost as a focal point for a tradition of economic scholarship, and is now a focal point for something else. We have to let it go…
I hate to read too much into it, but I can’t help but feel that DeLong is trying to make a point.
Lew Rockwell blogged my post (and called me “stimulating”!).
lucky [:@]
A thread like this about the LvMI would be locked immediately, my point about the inappropriateness of threads like this here is proved by that alone, and a simple application of not being a hypocrite.
I wonder, Esuric, how much of Caplan’s material have you read?
^Capital Pumper, brilliant, that just made my day.
Austrian economics is just a label, I see him remaining libertarian as more important. There are always differences between similar minded groups and individuals, and people who are uncomfortable with labels always exist.
So what?
I must admit that posts like those only serve to verify Boettke’s point about the label “Austrian”. Plus, he conveniently ignores post like this from the Coordination Problem that nullify his point. Things like this are the reason why I no longer frequent LewRockwell.com.
It shows that there is a hypocrisy about how one can treat other organizations: you can’t say some things about the LvMI, but feel free to say those things about other organizations.
If LvMI official position was to trick people into thinking that something is not what it is, there would be much worse problems than mere forum administration.
No it doesn’t! Not unless you’re operating under the childish delusion that all beliefs deserve respect.
After he said that I lost all interest.