Non-Austrian article criticizing mainstream economists.
http://www.iasc-culture.org/publications_article_2010_Summer_mirowski.php
“Where is Keynes when we really need him?”
Buried in a spent mine with his bottles of money. If you dig him up the employment of the diggers will surely get the economy back on track.
“As late as February 17, 2010, the PBS Newshour gave a platform to Chicago economist, Cato Institute member, and financial consultant John Cochrane to simply assert that government spending has no net effect on the economy. Insiders to the profession know this as “Ricardian Equivalence,” but that is tantamount to insisting, “You can’t fool Mother Market.” But fooling the Market was how the crisis developed in the first place. You should view the segment for yourself to gain an impression of the smug demeanor of someone who has drunk the Kool-Aid a little too avidly. I had to check my browser to make sure I wasn’t watching a clip from the Colbert Report. Perhaps Cochrane and I had been living in parallel universes over the previous two years. Just one representative quote: “The economy can recover very quickly from a credit crunch if left on its own.”19 Maybe in the Chicago Wormhole Universe. The real questions are: Why do the intrepid journalists of public television think that giving this guy a platform is “balance” in reporting? What set of social institutions has led us to accept that we have to keep getting exposed to this utterly predictable but uninformative stuff from economists? Where is Keynes when we really need him?”
Notice that he makes unsupported assertions [“fooling the Market was how the crisis developed in the first place”, “Maybe in the Chicago Wormhole Universe”], and uses mockery without proving his own case first, or showing any absurdities or flaws in Cochrane’s position.
Note that he is guilty of most, and perhaps all, of the things he whines about in the article. Smug demeanor, cognitive dissonance [cheerleading Keynes when he has obviously failed], ignorance of history [didn’t study the great depression by rothbard] and philosophy [didnt study human action], loses control of the discussion early on [has no clue about AE] appealing to Authority [quoting Keynes’s nonsense as if it was Holy Writ]. I don’t know his background, but it would be interesting to see what Enron’s he is tied into.
BTW, in the video he links to, John Cochcrane speaks solid common sense in simple understandable language. Nobody there refutes him; instead they change the subject.