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