[This article is excerpted from Human Action, chapter 16 section 7, “Good Will.”]
It must be emphasized again that the market is peopled by men who are not omniscient and have only a more or less defective knowledge of prevailing conditions.
First, let me say that I am not an economist. Nor do I actually own a legitimate armchair, for that matter.
Even as the Austrian critique of Greenspan’s housing bubble gains more adherents, some economists have tried to exonerate the former Maestro. Previously on these pages, I have responded to Henderson and Hummel’s defense of the former Fed chairman, and I also took on Greenspan’s own list of excuses.
I’ve been reading Mao’s Little Red Book, which I gather achieved some level of popularity among the New Left in the 1960s, which is nothing short of astonishing, given its open and aggressive call for mass death against resistors and it’s dripping-with-blood rhetoric about armed struggle from beginning to end. “Wherever there is struggle there is sacrifice, and death is a common occurrence…. All men must die, but death can vary in its significance.”
My buddy Vijay Boyapati mused in an email whether Mises had anticipated the eventual development of argumentation ethics. “Here he has a little discussion here which really reminds me a lot of Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics:”
My friend Peter Boettke is at it again. Pete is notorious for flippantly propagating gross distortions of the history of the modern Austrian revival.
“Those who tell you of trade-unions bent on raising wages by moral suasion alone are like people who tell you of tigers that live on oranges.”
– Henry George, 1891
