An interesting project from LearnLiberty. (They conveniently put links to the subsequent videos at the end of each video, but here’s a playlist anyway.)
Even disregarding the guy’s general annoyingness, he really doesn’t achieve what he claims to be the purpose of this series. He doesn’t really do a good job of explaining exactly how a lot of these views are very different…or why these “schools of thought” are even arranged as they are. It’s an interesting set up, and I think there’s something to it, but it seems a bit inchoate and not very well polished. He ends up having to repeat things, but at the same time present them as if they were different views.
Overall though, I think it’s still useful. I just hate when things like this (that would otherwise be great tools) become marred by various fallacies…
And you really have to love (and unfortunately expect) the fallacies when it comes to the Austrian School. He begins by asserting to outline differences between Hayek and Mises. He states that Hayek tended to focus on the “limits of knowledge” and this led him to give deference to “tradition, rules that evolve over time, common law”…and therefore “spontaneous order”.
I’m not quite sure how that follows, but okay. He continues on and asserts that Hayek is therefore “cautious about self-evident truths”. Again, I don’t exactly see how that follows. Finally he says that Hayek thinks that “much of the order that we see in society is the result of human action, but not of human design”. I don’t see a problem with this part, as it essentially sounds like spontaneous order.
However, he then follows by introducing Mises. He of course begins with a laughable fallacy and claims: “Mises adopts the ‘a priori deductive reasoning’. He believes that we identify certain truths — what he calls ‘axioms’ — that we can discover these axioms through our experience and through the use of reason.”
That’s literally what he said. A priori deductive truths are discovered through our experience. This guy is a professor.
I’ve come to accept the fact that most people (including highly educated academics and intellectuals are quite clueless when it comes to economics and political matters, and I’ve come to accept that at the most prestiguious “learning institutions” in the world, students are fed total garbage on a regular basis. But what really bugs me is when someone purports to be teaching about something like the Austrian School and they get even basic things completely wrong. [a hem] It’s one thing if you want to teach fallacies and nonsense. That’s bad enough. But to teach fallacies about subjects (like a school of thought that actually offers some truth about the world) is just inexcusible.
If you don’t understand the subject, don’t talk about it. And certainly don’t purport to teach it.
Next, he proceeds to list some axioms of Mises…obviously the first being “human action is purposeful”. Now he doesn’t say so or make this connection, but I wonder if this is what he meant by the “difference” between Hayek and Mises. Because just earlier, he says how Hayek belives that order “is the result of human action, but not of human design”. Now he’s saying how Mises says “human action is purposeful”. On the surface this can easily sound to be two opposing views, but obviously if you understand what either party was talking about, you know this isn’t exactly the case.
Again, I’m not sure if that was a supposed difference he was trying to highlight, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
He concludes that video by saying that Hayek belives in a set of general principles that he calls “the rule of law” that we should apply to every government action, while Mises, through his axioms, concludes that there is only a role for a minimal state protecting life, health, liberty, and property, and no role for a welfare state. Again I don’t exactly see how those things are mutually exclusive, but he nonetheless alleges these are two different ideas about the role of government.
[Of course I’m not claiming Mises and Hayek agreed on government. In my view Hayek was an obvious ordoliberal…I’m just pointing out that this guy makes all these claims as if he’s just illustrated them, when in fact he’s done nothing of the sort.]
And finally, I don’t quite understand the logic in the different classifications of these “schools of thought”. Obviously the Chicago School and the Austrian School fit in that category, and perhaps a “Public Choice School” (although I’ve never heard of such a thing, and I don’t quite see how it’s different from the Chicago School, and he doesn’t really make that clear)…but then he jumps to “natural rights” (a philosophical foundation), and then to “anarcho-capitalism” (a political philosophy). I don’t see how he fits these all under an umbrella of separate “schools of thought”, although he does give a decent try.
He says the point is that each “school of thought” arrives at the conclusion of limited government from a different angle or methodology. But the problem is, it’s not that simple. By the time he gets to anarcho-capitalism, he even admits how Rothbard follows a natural rights principle, and was influenced by Mises…and David Friedman comes to the same conclusion of anarchy but through a more “Chicago School methodology” of empirical study.
However, for all faults of the series, it is nice to not only see such an honest focus on Classical liberal thought, but anarcho-capitalism in particular. He presents the position with the very same respect and humility and legitimacy as every other reasoning. It’s quite refreshing.