In the field of economics, any narrative overly vague, poorly defined, or which cannot be substantiated is probably untrue. The current narrative garnering ever increasing media attention goes something like this:
“Inflation was extremely high in the 1970’s so the Fed raised rates and controlled inflation.”
For Mises, liberalism first emerged and expressed itself in the nineteenth century as a political movement in the form of “peaceful nationalism.” Its two fundamental principles were freedom or, more concretely, “the right of self-determination of peoples” and national unity or the “nationality principle.” The two principles were indissolubly linked. The primary goal of the liberal nationalist movements (Italian, Polish, Greek, German, Serbian, etc.) was the liberation of their peoples from the despotic rule of kings and princes.
It seems that every time something adverse happens in the labor market, it restarts the partisan battle between those currently in and out of power as to who is a better steward of the economy.
Steven B. Smith in Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes (Yale University Press, 2021) gives us an excellent example of a fallacious way of arguing. Once we see how Smith, a Yale political science and philosophy professor who should know better, falls into this pattern, we will get a clear idea of what the fallacy is and how to avoid it.
Being a former academic myself, I have many unpleasant memories of endless debates over methodology. Among these topics is the question of how quantitative methods ought to be used in economics, and when it is appropriate (if ever) for use in discovering and refining economic laws and axioms.
But academics aren’t the only ones who discuss these things. For example, I continue to hear from ordinary nonacademics who have apparently encountered this idea—a stereotype, really—that advocates for Austrian school economics “hate math.”
With the recent lack of availability in gasoline, Joe Biden came out with a clear message against price gouging stating:
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.
Unfortunately, this oldest and most general result of the theory of social phenomena [viz., the spontaneous coordination of individual efforts] has never been given a title which would secure it an adequate and permanent place in our thinking. The limitations of language make it almost impossible to state it without using misleading metaphorical words. The only intelligible form of explanation for what I am trying to state would be to say—as we say in German—that there is sense [Sinn] in the phenomena; that they perform a necessary function.
This paper, I examine aspects of Orwell’s political thought as expressed in Nineteen Eighty-four. I focus on the novel as an exploration of the logic of the conception of the modern state as a teleocracy or managerial enterprise, a concept which was elaborated by the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. I first provide a summary of Oakeshott’s historical account of the emergence of two competing visions of modern morality and the modern state, the individualistic and nomocratic versus the collectivist and teleocratic.
