Ask the Professor on Mises and Today's "The Calling"

Steven Horwitz

It's a Horwitz two-fer today.

1.  Over at the Fraser Institute's "Ask the Professor" feature, my essay for this month is on Mises's Human Action and I'll be doing a live chat/Q&A at 2pm EDT at that same site.  Feel free to join us.  Here's an excerpt from that piece:

From Mises’ understanding of the subjective nature of knowledge, valuation, and choice, he attempted to build up a complete understanding of economics in Human Action, from the basics of how prices emerge from valuation and choice and monetary exchange to the business cycle to the problems with various forms of government intervention and the impossibility of socialist planning.  In all of these cases, the central insight was that the market was not a “place or a thing” but “a process.”  Markets, particularly the exchange of private property for money, were a way in which humans attempted to improve their perceived situations.  Markets were not, as they were being more frequently depicted in mainstream economics, simply places where consumers and producers met to maximize utility and profits respectively based on prices “given” to them.  The market was not, for Mises, a maximization machine; the market was a dynamic process of change, learning, and growth. 

2. This morning's Freeman Online column is titled "Two Structural Reasons Why Government Fails."  It's the third part of the trilogy that began with "Neither Evil nor Incompetent" and "Conspiracy-Theory Socialism."  A snippet:

Together the knowledge and Public Choice problems provide the structural critique of government that enables classical liberals to avoid the pitfalls of assuming malevolence, incompetence, or grand conspiracy.  This structural critique is robust precisely because it applies even if we assume politicians and bureaucrats are incredibly smart and well-meaning.

Comments

[topills.com review]

"But among the physically talented, those who work smart and work hard are the ones who make it. And that was the real point of my posts on work ethic."

So in other words, you are stressing the blindingly obvious, while safely posing as socially acceptable (ie, anti-hereditarian). That's helpful, truly.