Leland B. Yeager

Calculation versus Knowledge

Several Austrian economists have recently introduced an emphatic distinction between calculation problems and knowledge problems besetting socialism. F. A. Hayek, they suggest, has shoved aside or perverted the analysis that Ludwig von Mises got straight in the first place. Especially now that experience in Eastern Europe bears out the arguments of Mises and Hayek, it is important to face the issue of the supposed tension between their positions.

Joseph T. Salerno

In this article on “Mises and Hayek on Calculation and Knowledge,” Leland Yeager argues against the view recently propounded by Murray Rothbard, Jeffrey Herbener, and myself that calculation and knowledge constitute separate and distinct problems of economic organization and that Ludwig von Mises attributed the impossibility of socialism exclusively to its inability to solve the former problem.

Barry Smith

This is a useful, clearly written study of the philosophical origins of Menger’s theorizing in economics. As the author points out in his conclusion: philosophy has been an accompanying presence at every stage in the development of Austrian economics. Moreover, “Action, that leitmotif of praxeology, has in the Austrian tradition received a distinctly Aristotelian analysis.

David Gordon

Professor Barry Smith’s characteristically erudite remarks about my pamphlet provide me with a welcome opportunity to offer some additions and corrections. I have no major disagreement with Smith’s comments, but he has at one place ascribed to me a much more ambitious thesis than I intended.

Roger W. Garrison

A good friend of mine has two sons who, in their youth, were unusually mischievous. On one occasion, when my friend had just replenished his liquor supply in preparation for a cocktail party that evening, his sons decided that a liquor cabinet was a pretty good substitute for a chemistry set. They broke the seals and poured from one bottle directly into the next: scotch into rum; rum into gin; gin into scotch. And they added a little créme de menthe all around.

Don Bellante

Mainstream macroeconomics is in disarray. Perusal of commonly used textbooks in macroeconomics will confirm that impression without much difficulty. Unfortunately, the same statement could have been made, and often was made, fifteen years ago. While in this sense little has changed in recent years, the disarray is now more fundamental and severe than at any time since the 1930s.

Walter Block

The premise underlying laissez-faire capitalism is that the only actions which should be illegal are those which involve an initiation of aggression against another person or his property. Antitrust law is clearly in violation of this principle, because it prohibits business practices no one even alleges constitute such depredations.

Joseph T. Salerno

Ludwig von Mises’s contributions to the development of the technical methods and apparatus of monetary theory continue to be neglected today, despite the fact that Mises succeeded exactly eight decades ago, while barely out of his twenties, in a task that still admittedly defies the best efforts of the most eminent of modern monetary theorists, viz., integrating monetary and value theory.

David Gordon

The phrase “redistributive taxation” is in a sense misleading. The modifier “redistributive” suggests that some taxation is not redistributive. A moment’s reflection will show that this is not the case. There would be no point in taking money from someone in taxation and returning to him precisely that amount. Unless taxation shifts resources, it achieves nothing.

John B. Egger

Arthur William Marget (1899–1962) was a respected American monetary theorist and scholar who received his doctorate from Harvard in 1926 and taught for the next fifteen years at the University of Minnesota. His best known work, The Theory of Prices (2 vols.: 1938, 1942), had three goals.