Reflection — what’s the point of it? Well, it works. But trying to get an economist to do it is like trying to get a child to check his figures — or a bad employee to check his work. A kid thinks, checking my figures just means doing my figures again, so why do that? A bad employee thinks checking his plumbing set-up or his electrical system just means more work. But if a person checks through his figures, and reflects on the correct procedures and answers, he can catch and make right a mistake.

Woodrow Wilson’s speech on postwar reconversion, As printed in American Affairs, V7, n 4.

From the Message of President Woodrow Wilson to the Congress on Dec. 2, 1918

THE devouring state has lost a gadfly. The political masquerade will miss one who stood always on the curbstone casting derision and mockery upon it, and felt an urchin’s delight when a mummer touched his mask with an embarrassed gesture to make sure it had not slipped. And the few who love freedom, knowing what it is they love, are fewer by one.

The Engineer

The ideal of conscious control of social phenomena has made its greatest influence felt in the economic field. The present popularity of “economic planning” is directly traceable to the prevalence of the scientistic ideas we have been discussing. As in this field the scientistic ideals manifest themselves in the particular forms which they take in the hands of the applied scientist and especially the engineer, it will be convenient to combine the discussion of this influence with some examination of the characteristic ideals of the engineers.

Professor Roger Garrison is a leader in the field of Austrian macroeconomics, and has had a burning passion his whole career to present Austrian business cycle theory in terms that mainstream economists can understand and identify. This book represents the culmination of his efforts in that regard.

I’ve decided I just don’t like Hulsmann’s chapter on Mises and money. The problem isn’t scholarship, there’s enormously impressive scholarship here. The problem for me is that there is a bit too much “cart before the horse” theoretical exposition, often at a very abstract level and somewhat disconnected from a narrative over time concerning Mises’ own research problems and evolving insights.

The principal criticism of “scientific” socialists of capitalism is that it, in addition to being allegedly the most oppressive and exploitative system in the history of mankind, is an inherently irrational, “anarchic” system of economic organization invariably susceptible to recurring outbursts of overproduction leading to economic crisis, unemployment, and misery amidst obviously unprecedented development of productive powers and plenty in modern societies.Rosa Luxemburg, a major Marxist economist, in her classic

Mises, Hayek, and Isabel Paterson write for the newly posted issue of American Affairs from 1945. Garrett himself warns of a growing “American Menace”: “If only the American power were apparitional— if it would appear only when needed to trample the aggressor down, and then, having raised the aggressor’s victims to their feet again, if it would retire upon itself instead of forcing the economic rivalries of peace to new extremes, Europe would be greatly obliged.”

Can we capture the error of “scientism” in a single reminder? Let’s give it a try. Here’s the reminder: the error of “scientism” arises when a scientist practices “explanation” by the elimination or the forgetting of non-eliminable components of the problem which gave rise to the theoretical constructions of his discipline.

With the almost constant statist apologetics we hear from many government and academic economists, writes Ben O’Neill, it is hard to believe that the discipline of economics was once a thorn in the side of the state and its political elite. So commonplace are fallacious economic arguments advocating state control that it sometimes seems that refutation of all of these arguments has become a case of cutting the heads off the Hydra — a tiring and fruitless endeavor.