I see that Regney has an new entry to their “politically incorrect guide” series, this one on socialism. Haven’t read it yet.
But I’m not familiar with its author, Kevin D. Williamson. He apparently works at National Review, but never heard of him in libertarian or austrian circles. I saw one of the reviews at amazon mentioned his “austrian perspective”, but that’s no proof one way or another.
Anyone have more info on the author or book?
MB:
I’ve been an editor at National Review for a the past three years and write a blog, Exchequer, about public debt. I was at the Institute for Humane Studies before that, and in the newspaper business before that.
I don’t know that I’d call myself an Austrian, simply because that would mean calling myself an economist, which I am not. But my main critique of socialism in the book is rooted in the Austrian knowledge/calculation problem, lots of Mises and Hayek, etc.
There’s an excerpt from the book up on NRO, or you could get a pretty good idea of my approach from “Welcome to the Machine,” a recent essay I wrote about regulation.
If you’ve read a ton of Austrian economics, you won’t find much of anything new in the book, I’m afraid, except maybe some pretty good socialism jokes, or the Sweden chapter, or possibly the stuff on socialism’s environmental record. You might find some value in my simplified lines of argument, which I think are pretty helpful when presenting the case to people who haven’t read Mises, Hayek, etc., and who aren’t going to.
I’m pretty happy with it, but don’t expect “Human Action.”
Very best,
Kevin Williamson
Oh good.
Frankly, we have a major problem of presenting an easily accessable argument with lots of examples, anecdotes, etc. We have large, wordy walls of text that speak the truth, but are a bit hard for a newcomer to comprehend (Human Action covers things in a great way, but you had better be dedicated if you want to actually read and understand it). Otherwise, a lot of our literature seems quite outdated (particularly the stuff by Mises and Hayek that, while timeless to a certain degree, uses references to things that a reader 60 years later won’t get).
Socialists, welfare-statists, conservatives, they all have entertaining ways of spreading their message. They keep getting the comedians (P.J O’Rourke is fun to read, but he is a war-mongering conservative, and Cracked is a front for our pals at the Huffington Post), the supportive movies, the funny non-fiction writers, the cool fiction books, the comics, etc. We get, judging by a time we asked around once, a mixture of economists who write informative (if dull) articles, programmers, IT guys, university students, and engineers. An intelligent crowd, but not one that sways the masses.
Don’t get me wrong, we have some funny stuff too (Tom Woods is good at it, for example) and easy to understand tidbits of information, but we are severely lacking overall. We don’t even have the cheap soundbites that they always use. Hell, even the Objectivists are better at that sort of thing. In terms of non-fiction, we have the PIGs, and thats it. With fiction, the only powerful battleship we have is Alongside Night, backed by obscure sci-fi novels from the 80s and the Probablity Broach (which is reasonably well written, but is far too utopianistic for my tastes). We have Withur We, which is quite an awesome book, but it is self-published, meaning about 90% of the readers will be Austrians who already know this stuff anyway. We have basically no films or vidya gaems that are really supportive, either.
Bleh. Bit of a rant. Whatever the case, I have to say it is always nice when we get the fun stuff for a change.
You might be the first person worth reading at NRO, so as far as I am concerned, call yourself an Austrian, PLEASE. Not everyone employing the Austrian methodology is an economist. There are lots of lay people, professionals and academics in other disciplines who identify as Austrian and it is encouraged.
I have to agree with “My Buddy”. We need more works like this that can be given to the average or above average reader and explain why the free market, etc. is best. I don’t bother with all the PIG series, but I have the ones on capitalism, new deal, and the constitution. Sounds like a good addition to these.
And my take, is that if one accepts the views of the austrian school, one can call themselves ‘austrian’. I was many concerned because too often there are people out there that try to claim they are libertarian, who are more “beltway libertarians” or some kind of liberal or neocon who claims to be a libertarian (tho if you read or listen to them, you realize they aren’t).
Mr. Williamson,
Thanks for coming on the forum and telling us about the book and your Austrian background. I’ll probably be buying your book soon, you make it sound interesting. By all means, call yourself an “Austrian.” You might not be an economist, but if you work for NRO and just published a book, I feel like you could at least be considered an “Austrian journalist” of some sort, a la Hazlitt. Good luck with the book.
Here is an interview he did with Glen Reynolds (aka instapundit) here : http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=86&load=4759
Kevin, I found something interesting in your article.
You point out that von Mises hadn’t considered non-Soviet, indirect control of means of production as possible another form of socialism, but in fact, he does, when he deals with Hitler’s economic system in Omnipotent Government. He had considered the idea of socialism done not by direct ownership but indirect control, although he labelled it as Etatism in the book and said it eventually has the same results as the Soviet model.
By the way, how do you think your book would compare to Thomas Fleming’s Socialism? That one deals with less conventional examples, like Mexico after the Mexican Revolution and Yugoslavia under the Croat warlord Marshall Tito. Another famous primer on socialism is Alexander Gray’s The Socialist Tradition.