Tag: Austrian School

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Brains in Crisis

The Atlantic offers a fascinating portrait of the Honorable Ron Paul in “The Tea Party’s Brain.” Its blurb neatly explains the subject’s significance: “One way to measure the surprising … rise of the Tea Party is to chart the relative position of Ron Paul, who has never flinched from his beliefs. He’s not alone anymore.” 

But I want to focus not on writer Joshua Green’s take on Ron Paul but on Austrian economics — which Rep. Paul, almost alone in Washington, supports — and economic policy regarding crises:

The Austrian school … had fallen away after the Great Depression, which it claimed was caused by an expansion of the money supply and could be met only with chastened submission as the market corrected itself. Herbert Hoover’s Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, offered similar counsel, famously urging Hoover to “liquidate” and “purge the rottenness out of the system.” But this failed to stop the catastrophe. 

From Green’s statement you would think that President Hoover had accepted Mellon’s advice. He had not. Hoover often took pride in the fact that he did all sorts of things to prevent prices from coming down — from “liquidating” — after 1929. 

Green followed the above-​quoted passage with a plug for strong, activist government to pry the economy out of crisis. In light of the facts? Not so persuasive. 

A truth for Tea Party brains: The Great Depression featured a spendthrift, meddling Republican prez followed by an even more spendthrift, more meddlesome Democrat. 

A pattern history now repeats.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

Tea Readers

According to a New York Times article by Kate Zernike, the “Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-​Ago Texts.” A strange way of saying that Tea Party folks are reading, learning, and studying ideas older than those of, say, Paul Krugman.

Tea Partiers are reading classics … but ones not recognized as such by the New York Times:

  • Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
  • F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
  • Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

Huh? That third book serves as an oddity on the list. It’s a handbook on street-​level ways to effect political change. The left’s loved it for years. Now it’s in the hands of people with scant interest in mass expropriation or heavy, vindictive regulation, or a vast, tax-​funded gimme-​gimme state. 

The article cites the “Austrian School of Economics” — a brand of economics that includes many of the most important free-​market thinkers — as an important force, but merely mentions its 20th century leader, Ludwig von Mises, as if a duty. Bastiat, a French economist who died before the school was founded, is lumped in with Mises and Hayek, perhaps because he’s so radically anti-taxation that the Times hopes by mentioning his ideas over and over, readers might dismiss him as a nut.

That could backfire. Some of the Times’s smarter readers might become curious, reading Bastiat and Mises and Hayek with the notion of learning something. 

Maybe they’ll even read the Constitution.

Wow. What a revolutionary thought.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.