In my critique of Austrian economics, I carved out a virtually unique position: Despite the Austrians' professed devotion to "realism” against neoclassical pragmatism, the latter approach is in fact far more realistic than the former.
The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics, E.G.
Economists must either make their value judgments explicit and defend them with a coherent ethical system, or strictly refrain from entering, directly, or indirectly, into the public policy realm.
From The Review of Austrian Economics Vol. 10, No. 2, 1997.
It took seven decades, but most people now accept what Ludwig von Mises explained three quarters of a century ago, namely, that centrally directed socialistic economies cannot succeed in coordinating vast numbers of interrelated decisions, in large part because of the information problem arising from non-market forms of resource allocation (Mises 1920). No amount of input-out- put models generated on vast computers can overcome the problems of directing resources under changing conditions of wants and scar-city.
Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 11, 1974.
Henry Hazlitt VENTURA Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Paper Capture Plug-in
From Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie Journal of Economics, Spring 1977.
