“Oh, yeah?”
<= Well, yeah. I honestly hope that the next generation of scholars can get alone without the need of bashing each other.
I think I don’t get the ‘oh yeah’?
lol was just kidding. you had to be there I guess
Sorry for my misunderstanding than. 
The bad blood between the coordination problem and Austrian group will perhaps not settle until Lew Rockwell stops linking to conspiracy theorists in his website. 
Just joking, but here’s what Austrian School’s William L. Anderson once said: “As an academic economist, it offends me that other academic economists would try to take sides in party politics.” He was talking about Krugman’s cheerleading of medical insurance legislatioons. Even the other centre-left economists take some skepticism towards any proposed legislation, and worry more about what the costs of such legislation would be beyond stage one.
Could it be that the focus on movementarianism has removed the focus on thinking and ideas? It’s very easy to have a movement - all you do is shout brainless slogans. Discussing limitations of knowledge with the general public is much harder.
Why is everyone claiming that there is bad blood between the Mises Institute and George Mason University? A handful of individuals, some associated with LewRockwell.com and LvMI, have attacked the economists at coordinationproblem.org for quite some time.
http://blog.mises.org/11153/peace/
David Kramer and Thomas DiLorenzo should re-read that. It’d do them some good. These guys are hardly beltway libertarians who are out there to smear Mises and Rothbard. They’re good economists doing work in, but not limited to, the Austrian tradition.
Smells like their other field is involvement with beltway libertarianism.
And Dilorenzo wrote an article?
Marked,
could you give a solid definition/description of what you mean by ‘Beltway Libertarianism’?
One that kisses ass to Washington, is my guess.
Giving that definition, not even Cato can be called beltway libertarians.
They engaged in a vicious smear attack against Ron Paul, and defend the Fed. How is that not kissing ass to Washington?
“They engaged in a vicious smear attack against Ron Paul, and defend the Fed. How is that not kissing ass to Washington?”
<= Well; ‘kissing ass’ compared to what and who?
I think that (some people at) Cato didn’t do justice to the Ron Paul movement and Ron Paul as a person. That is most definitely true and I would agree that some criticisms there is in order.
I don’t know any defense of the Fed coming from Cato; when I read the Cato blog I mostly/only find very criticial remarks on the Fed and the concept of central banking. You might link a few persons affiliated with Cato that defend the fed; Cato isn’t the Mises Institute (thank God); but it doesn’t follow from a few differences and mistakes that they ‘kiss ass to Washington’.
If you factor into account that the Mises Institute and the Cato Institute are doing 2 different things than I don’t see them kissing up. They make some mistakes - who doesn’t? - but so what? The Cato institute is a constant stream of criticisms of the government; but in a different kind of game that the Mises Institute or the Lew Rockwell website participate in. I’m not defending one over the other - I’m more inclined to the Mises Institute even - but I see no real need in attacking the cato institute, just because they chose a different approach.
Is there approach anti-libertarian? I don’t really see why. And as long as it isn’t; then I would support them, even if they do sometimes things I wouldn’t have done - like the Ron Paul affaire.
"
I mostly agree with Adrian.
I wrote a long response to the Robert Wenzel blog post, but Blogger (which is a rubbish blogging platform) lost it. I don’t know why anyone uses Blogger in 2010.
I’m not a big fan of some of these other factions but it seems to me that LRC overreacts and blows these things up bigger than they need to be. The name change to Coordination Problem for the blog would have been almost completely unnoticed, if LRC hadn’t made a big deal about it.
It seems to me that people they consider soft of Austrianism distancing themselves from Austrian Economics would be a GOOD thing.
At the end of the day, this Kochtopus thing probably has significant legs, but at the same time, with so much good going on with Austrian Economics and libertarianism, focusing on 30+ year old conflicts seems really counter-productive and regressive to me. I don’t know if some feel compelled to keep the flame burning as some sort of act of loyalty to Rothbard, but I suspect Rothbard probably would have been too thrilled with all the progress of the last 4 years to be hung up on settling old scores.
Sins of ommission are not always sins of commission.
Adrian, I think a better explanation is due.
I only noticed it recently, but there seem to be two sides of Lew Rockwell.
One is the simple serious economist involved in the matters of his profession.
The other is the proud grassroots Southerner.
The latter shows up now and then. It’s the Southerner who hates the elitist culture of New York and Washington, DC and is more at home with simpler joys and virtues of Deep South folk. It’s the Southerner who is still angry about Northern Republican Reconstructionism. It’s the Southerner who dislikes Ivy League academics and Beltway policy wonks who keep finding ways to social reform and engineer the old bourgeois life of the South. It’s the Southerner who feels that the South’s wrongful racist policies of the past are nonetheless exaggerated by an evil establishment. It’s the Southerner who idealizes those rural and middle class folk and detests the cabal of elites that is descended from the one that has existed since the days of Alexander Hamilton.
Obviously, that didn’t stop him from keeping good company with a Brooklyn man like Rothbard, who himself was nonetheless sympathetic to Southerners over corrupt Republican “carpetbaggers” from the North. But here’s the point.
Rockwell sees the elite’s culture as one that is fundamentally incompatible with knowing or understanding any other point of view. It shall only embrace whatever social engineering ideology that is in fashion in with the elite. Hence, this Mises Institute was started far away from the establishment in Auburn, Alabama. The elites are evil, and all that can be done is talk to and educate people. It’s much better for the Rockwell group to associate with silly over-the-top folks like Alex Jones and wrestlers like Kane over decadent, amoral, un-Christian politicians and academics.
Cato, on the other hand, located itself close to legislators, bureaucrats, and technocrats in Washington. The Koch brothers, obviously being the complete opposite of the kind of grassroots Southerner that Rockwell is, feel that they can appeal and persuade the government that its policies are wrong. So they adopt an entryist method. They try to become advisors to Republican presidential candidates, work within their campaigns, and hope to turn them towards alternative policies. They convince legislators that they do believe in their sincerity, but only wish for realistic understanding of economics.
It’s a culture war between American libertarians. Hell, it’s probably a culture war between Americans. It doesn’t fall neatly across political lines, as you can see. A polite Texan progressive might be outraged by the loose sex life of a New Yorker progressive.
This culture war, that goes back to the days of LBJ’s Great Society, to the days of segregationist South, to the days of WIlson’s election, to the days of Reconstruction, to the days of the Civil War, to the days of the formation of America, to times before a single settler set foot in America back in Britain. It was in Britain itself, that one self-righteous group of Puritans and rich Londoners, and the other group of simple red-headed country folk were at odds with each other, with the former deriding the latter as “crackers” and “rednecks”. The “rednecks” carried their habits and virtues into America, and the righteous folk took their self-destructive melancholy into New England. This culture war is so old, so deeply rooted, that it will never ever be fully healed as long as anybody the Deep South or Deep North of America knows or remembers this history. Let alone reconciliation between Mises Institute and Cato Institute.
Lew Rockwell is a transplanted southerner. His family is from New England.
Can’t you be an Elitist and still detest all of these elements?
Everyone, after me! The Lew Rockwell song:
He was raised on beans and cornbread
And he likes his chicken fried
Yes, he drives a pickup truck
And he’s full of American pride
He keeps a Bible on his table
He’s got a flag out on his lawn
And he loves them Rambo movies
He thinks they make a lot of sense
He is crazy about the NFL
And a diehard NASCAR Fan
He doesn’t care what nobody says
He doesn’t trust ole Gorbachev
And he doesn’t know who turned him on
But it’s time to turn him off