A paragraph like this would never have appeared in any American paper in the last 40 years. Now it seems commonplace. The New York Times says of the main debate in economics today:
There’s John Maynard Keynes on the one side, arguing for deficit spending to offset the aftereffects of a once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis. On the other side there’s Ludwig von Mises (his fellow Austrians Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich von Hayek seem too moderate for the role), thundering that all government intervention in the economy is doomed to failure.
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There was another mises reference in The National Post today. Maybe the writer read your article.
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/10/06/terence-corcoran-apple-under-jobs-was-quintessentially-corporate/
Now if only they would actually read the damn treatises of each…
From the article:
“As a rule, economists don’t know much about history.”
Okay Sylvia Nasar…okay, maybe it should be rewritten as “New York Times Journalists, as a rule, do not know much about economics OR history.”
The author’s subtle and cagey comparison imbues his imbalance, with Keynes “arguing for…”, an image of scholarly intellectualism, logic and empathy, seeking a solution to a cataclysmic exception in humanity’s experience. The Von Mises image is “thundering,” like a obstinate single mindedness, reactionary, casually letting them eat cake.
Fox’s article illustrates his scholasticism, seemingly effortless in his ability to wend through a who’s who in economics. Even if I disregard his vocation at the Harvard Business Review and I forget that this reference is, after all, from the New York Times, he ultimately embeds code words such as the “Great Recession” in his commentary.
I agree that von Mises requires more brand recognition, but a slight is still a slight.
He tries to make it sound as if it is only now, in the most desperate circumstances, “once in a lifetime”, that Keynesians have been pushing their inflationary agenda. But they’ve been pushing it for many decades, and I can think of at least half a dozen times in the last 20 years, never mind in my entire lifetime, that Keynesianism has been tried and failed.
So the Keynesians look like reasonable people – “Look, we’ve tried all this free enterprise and deregulation stuff, now for a real change from anything we’ve done before, why not try some of this stuff that Keynes was talking about? Maybe a complete change in policy is just what the economy needs.”
I have noticed a major change over the last three years in the battle of ideas. Topics that were seemingly closed for debate have been reopened. Are the Austrian economists getting fairly represented in the media? Of course not, but the debate is going on nonetheless. mises.org is one of the leading intellectual sources for the side of liberty in that debate, keep up the great work!
I wish more people would point out that Keynes did not design our current system. The Fed was a political invention just before WWI (1914). Keynes just supplied support for what the ruling elite were going to do anyway; what they were in fact doing already (General Theory 1937). And he knew that money expansion is not sustainable. He warned against trying to do it all the time in his book. Our rulers just bring Keynes up when it suits them and then forget him when things are going well.
They will give you change you can believe in, but not substantive change.
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