[DEBATE] One of the best ways to promote the Austrian School

Miscellaneous Current Events
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1

The Mises Institute has done some great work in providing the non-economist with materials to educate him/herself in the Austrian tradition, and their delivery methods (free literature in various formats, free podcasts, youtube videos of their conferences, etc.) have made their message readily available to those interested. There has been a lot of work done by mises.org and other like-minded think tanks to help propagate the Austrian Schools message.

However, I’m sure most of you–like me–have discovered the disinterest among the average person in adjusting the time they have available throughout the day to read Rothbard or Hazlitt. I operate a website with a friend of mine devoted to the task of making these ideas interesting for the general population, but have discovered time and again that certain avenues are more productive than others; another site isn’t the best tactic.

Instead, I have used the time I would’ve devoted to writing blog posts, to debating people on popular forums (mostly YouTube and Reddit). I’ve found that this is a more affective strategy for those of us who don’t have third party donors. It’s useful in many ways but mostly by

1)Publicly refuting economic fallacies

2)People who are already interested in economics (whether the topic is about unemployment or whatever) are “coming to you,” so you don’t need to go to the mall and scare the sh#! out of people like a crazy preacher.

  1. These curious folks will likely view the comments and the subsequent debate going on and may possibly be interested in an idea that was given in a rebuttal (basically being passively educated).

  2. We have an opportunity to pique the interests of our opponent by challenging their ideas and possibly changing their minds (if they decide to do more research on the topic in order to destroy your argument, they may in fact inadvertently come upon information that destroys the foundations of their arguments).

  3. We eliminate the chances of another “Hayek moment” from happening.

6)We passively educate the “inexperienced” Austrians.

I’ve learned a lot of Austrian econ in the couple years that I’ve studied it. But I still have some holes in my understanding, so I am unable to engage in certain debates because I don’t want to look like an idiot. Would anyone (or maybe the mises community at large) be interested in forming a kind of “rebuttal network” where we’d post the link to a YouTube video, Reddit discussion, NYT post, or some other place where the free market is being attacked and we can all systematically visit the aforesaid link to contribute our intellectual insights to the discussion and dismantle all fallacious and possibly malicious discourse? To help identify if a forum post is one of these “call to action” posts and where help is needed, maybe we can post a kind of “tag” in the title of the post on this forum (I put [DEBATE] to maybe setup a precedent).

I’m new to the mises community (long time reader, new poster) so maybe you guys/gals already do this. If not, allow me to start off the coordinated rebuttal with a link to a YouTuber who insists on bashing Peter Schiff and is planning a “live open debate: Peter Schiff Cult Followers vs Peter Schiff Haters” The link is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kndCN8Nhzxg

It will take place on Saturday, Oct 16, 2010 from 12-2pm E.S.T. in the comments section of the video (if the idiot remembers to unlock the comments).

Everyday I go to YouTube and type in “Peter Schiff” or “Ron Paul” or “Jim Rogers” etc. and filter the results in the Upload Date to “today,” and there has been an increasing trend in attacks on Austrians like Schiff. In the last month or so I’ve noticed that when I filter the results like I mentioned before, instead of getting all the “Schiff was right” stuff, I’m getting videos attacking Schiffs ideas (and therefore the free market perspective). Try it out and see what I mean. Now luckily these videos aren’t getting very many views, however I fear that if we allow these things to get out of control it could be another Hayek/Keynes moment. I think we could help the mises fellows out a lot by debunking myths when they start and where they’re most likely to be viewed by an uneducated (in economics not in general) population. Another disturbing trend is on Reddit (a hugely influential site), where the community tends to be more knowledgable in other areas (physics, mathematics, chemistry, etc.) but where there is a lot of socialist/liberal sympathies. By going to the more liberal/keynesian sites where economic knowledge is diverse among the users (both experienced keynesians and average joes) we can play a more influential role than say commenting on Paul Krugmans columns all the time (I’ve experienced the efficacy of this myself).

Anyway sorry for the long post, but let me know what you think and hopefully I’ll see some of you on Saturday the 16th.

PS-The reason why I think this is neccessary–beyond the educational purposes I mentioned above–is that some less experienced “libertarians” are making us all look like crazy dumb a$$es among very popular YouTuber’s (just using YouTube as an example). For instance, there’s a guy named thunderf00t who’s channel is mostly concerned with refuting creationism and promoting atheism. However, there is another YouTuber named howtheworldworks, who claims to be a libertarian but sucks a@$ at articulating the message and I’ve seen the atheist community (because of thunderf00ts influence) attack this guy and his “ideas” in their videos and thus their 50k-100k+ viewers are given an inaccurate depiction of the free market. By responding to these people like I’ve suggested, we can really get the right message out there and have a greater influence.

2

How the world works is Lee Doren, the crasher-in-chief at Bureaucrash. He’s a conservative statist, despite invoking Bastiat all the time.

It’s hard to overcome wannabe beltway wonks with wealthy patrons.

3

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. What is the “Hayek moment?”

4

I mean similar to Hayek’s response (or lack thereof) to Keynes’ General Theory in the 1930s that allowed his ideas to become so popular.

5

Yeah that was my observation too, I was just trying to be nice :slight_smile: But shouldn’t we try to “overcome” these wannabe’s? I mean after all, they are propagating their message under our banner, and their incompetence in the subject makes their rebuttals weak and clumsy; making all of us look like exploiting idiots. It’d be nice to have some well learned austrians get the word out, than some idiot who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Plus it’d be nice to have some company :frowning:

6

I think that was due to the fact that Hayek had just finished refuting Keynes’ previous book, then Keynes came out with his General Theory and Hayek didn’t see the need to reply to it (maybe due to lack of patience or interest).

7

Concerning a lack of a response to The General Theory by part of Hayek, Bruce Caldwell discusses this to some length in his introduction to Liberty Fund’s Contra Keynes and Cambridge. Caldwell gives the following reasons:

  1. Hayek had reviewed Keynes’s Treatise on Money, and in response Keynes told Hayek that he had changed his mind on most of what he wrote in that book. Writes Caldwell, “Hayek wrote no review of The General Theory then because he assumed that by the time he had completed the task, Keynes would have changed his mind again.”
  2. Hayek may have been interested in avoiding any more controversy. Hayek had been at the head of defending what can now be considered Austrian theory. Specifically, contra Frank Knight (capital theory and interest rate theory, mostly), Keynes, and Sraffa. In other words, Hayek had fallen prey to “intellectual fatigue”.
  3. At the time, Hayek was preparing for The Pure Theory of Capital, which unfortunately was published at a very poor moment (in the midst of a world war, and when The General Theory had already taken root). Hayek may have been hoping for a similar response that he had gotten for Prices & Production (where he virtually took sway over most of the LSE).

One of Hayek’s key failures, I think, was not becoming aware of the general inferiority of Walras’s general equilibrium model—a model incompatible with that of Menger’s price formation theory, and Mises’s dynamic market process approach. Caldwell argues that Hayek began to shy away from general equilibrium after the 1930s, and I believe Salerno has argued that in fact Hayek only distanced himself away from the Austrian school in later years (Hayek is a confusing figure, because if you read his Choice in Currency it’s actually very Austrian and very extreme, but other works around the same time were far more compromising). In any case, during the late 1920s and the 1930s, Hayek’s model generally followed that of general equilibrium. This approach, of course, was adopted by most of the LSE schools, including John Hicks (who would go on to be a leading Keynesian). Ultimately, I think it comes down to an inadequate defense of methodology and basic economic principles (price formation, in this case), that ultimately led to the conversion of much of the LSE (including such prominent members as Lionel Robbins) to Keynesianism.

The correction to this discrepency was Mises’s Human Action, but the German version was soon suppressed by German aggression in Europe and the ensuing Second World War. By the time Yale published the English edition, in 1949, the battle had been lost—Human Action, however, did lead to Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State, which arguably set up the revival of the Austrian school beginning ten years later.