Very disappointing this hoarding stuff. I posted the following comment on the 2nd video:
Lawrence White doesn’t understand why people would hold cash reserves in times of economic uncertainty and therefore he wants the government to counterfeit new money, which is then inescapably distributed unfairly among the population. Tragic.
Google: The Virtue of Hoarding, George F. Smith, Mises Daily.
Youtube: The Yield from Money Held (by Hans Hoppe)
White is a pseudo-Keynesian. Keynesians have a strange fixation on consumption. Everyone always has to rock and roll all night and party every day or the sky is falling. Thus, hoardophobia.
Lol @ your comments.
White is a misesian by the way.
What a high quality of comments we have here.
TS: can you point out the part where White endorses the oh-so-horrible view?
For reference, the charges above against his views are destroyed in his FEE lecture, available at their site.
Which one is that?
I think it was this.
http://fee.org/media/video/free_banking/
There are aslo these.
http://fee.org/media/video/austrian_economics_and_the_financial_crisis/
I can’t watch any of the videos.
Codec, plugin. Works for me. Opera 10. There are the audio podcast as last resort.
I think for the term “misesian” to have any meaning, you would have to be, at bare minimum, a praxeologist. At least for you to consider yourself a misesian. White is clearly not a praxeologist. Not that he rejects it, but he sees no problem in abandoning it for the sake of his theoretical work. His theory of “free banking” is based on mostly empirical work, and much of his work and positions in monetary theory are also not based on praxelogly.
I think Mises would have rejected such work on pure methodological grounds.
They reuploaded the videos and all the comments are gone.
The last time I checked he and Selgin both accepted and supported the praxeological reasoning of Mises.
I’m not sure this assessment is entirely justified. If you read his ‘Competition and Currency: Essays on Free Banking and Money’ it’s clearly a work in the Misesian tradition. All though he doesn’t explicitly mentions praxeology, it is clear that his theory is based on a causal-realistic assessment of humans with deductive logic. Saying that his theory of free banking is based ‘mostly’ on empirical work is, I think, confusing his illustrations with actual inductive proof - which it clearly is not.
By the way; Mises didn’t reject empirical work. He rejected deducting economic laws based on empirical observations. White doesn’t do that; so I’m not sure if Mises would rejected it ‘pure’ on methodological grounds. If you read Horwitz his microfoundations and macroeconomics; you’ll also notice that ‘empirics’ have nothing to do with the theory regarding monetary equilibrium or free banking; it’s based on an causal-realistic analysis.
I’m not entirely sure wether or not there theory is correct. I still have some problems accepting some notions as true. But I’m not convinced that it’s ‘empirical induction’.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to to state that most of what White has contributed to the modern free banking theory is empirically based. I clearly said that he does NOT reject praxeology, so him referring to a lot of misesian economics in much of his writings does not make my statement untrue. Much of his contribution to the theory is grounded on empirical and historical work. But I never said he does not strongly sympathize or even identify with a lot of Mises’ work.
I didn’t say he did.
How does White not do that? Does he not refer to his empirical work every time somebody says: show me or prove it… If he rejected empirical work as a basis for theory, he would never do that.
I’m not quite sure why you are telling me what Horwitz says in order to prove what White is not?
Horwitz’ book is an excellent example of Austrian economics gone bad, which starts to be apparent only after his few introductory chapters. What happens when the Misesesian tradition of rigorous logical deductive reasoning is relaxed, or sometimes even completely abandoned? I think his book is just that illustration. He ignores precisely the most revealing and important “Austrian microfoundations” required to expose the fallacies in his theoretical work, but on the other hand, dedicates 2 chapters on ill defined monetarist and Keynesian pseudo-scientific concepts, which cannot withstand any logical scrutiny for a second.
My initial comment was due to lumping White with Horwitz.
Has he never heard of the real balance effect? If you allow price deflation to continue, the hoarders will spend/invest their money when they feel prices have fallen low enough. That’s the way the market clears.
I’m watching these videos right now, Larry White is incoherent when advocating bank policies.
He’s like, inflate, but don’t inflate too much. Inflate so people don’t leave goods unsold, but don’t inflate so much that the most expensive goods clear.
Video 3 of 3 coming up, and I don’t know how much more of this I can take. If he is Austrian, then I am not. His methodology seems completely ad hoc.