mck@ratex.UUCP (Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan) (01/25/85)
Mr Carnes writes at great length, but if I read him correctly, his key points may be summarized as follows: 1) Mc Kiernan appears to have resticted his education to Austrian School Economics. Here Mr Carnes is quite wrong; my formal economic training was in Lausanne style microeconomics and Keynesian macroeconomics, with a little Monetarism, Ratex, and Austrian School economics thrown in. 2) Mises's thesis was refuted, and even some proponents of Capitalism recognized this. The specific reason that I mentioned misrepresentation was because misrepresentations of Mises can be refuted. Not all the misrepresentation was intentional (some of it may have stemmed from semantical confusion) and not all of those fooled by the misrepresentation were Socialists. The reason that I directed the reader to *Socialism*, rather than to 'Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth' (also found in *Collectivist Economic Planning*) is that in the later work, Mises had the opportunity to untangle some of the confusion. 3) In the face of the existence of as many schools of thought as exist in the field of economics, it is illegitimate for Mc Kiernan to present one position as definitive. This would seem to imply that economic truth is established by consensus, rather than by objective analysis of reality -- a kind of majoritarian metaphysics. In point of fact, the methodology of the really hard-core Austrians like Mises (and I am not one) is so rigorous that it requires incredible assumptions (eg: a collapse of preference transitivity) to logically oppose its conclusions; this rigor also restricts the productivity of the hard-core Austrians, and is one of the reasons that it's not been universally adopted. Additionally, Mr Carnes declares that he will not debate economics with me. This seems to me to be rather like some one attending a presenation on physics, standing up an declaring the principle of conservation of energy to be a fraud (there ARE, in fact, differing views), and then refusing to debate the matter but threatening further such declarations. As far as Mr Carnes' suggestion that I do graduate work on von Mises' thesis, whatever I produced would be a duplication of existing work. This would be no more rewarding than, say, recreating the Special Theory of Relativity. My advisor would denounce me as a plagiarist, the European economists would never hear of me, and my fellow anti-Socialists would wonder how so much promise could be so completely wasted. I used to be disgusted; now I try to be amused. Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan