Tom Woods
Tom Woods has an excellent piece on LRC today criticising Catholic social theorists who think they can derive policy proposals from papal pronouncements without having to know any economics.
Of course I think Tom’s case against extending papal authority to economic facts is an equally good argument against accepting it for the moral and theological facts that are supposed to be its proper ambit, since these facts too “cannot be protested, defied, or lectured to” but “can only be learned and acted upon.” But since he so nicely cites my abstraction paper I won’t press the point.
I am really glad Tom Woods cited your paper on the concequences of Plato’s and Aristotle’s theory of concepts for economic theory, or I would probably not have come across it.
A gem of an article.
Charles Clark’s “Response” to the articles by Storck and Woods is particularly cringe-inducing (see especially pp. 2-3). If Clark were an atheist who wanted to make fun of religious believers and portray them as moralizing and ignorant, he could not have done a better job.
Plus historical ignorance — given that Austrian praxeology grows fairly directly out of the Thomistic tradition.
I thought Clark’s response was just fine — he grasps what Austrian economics is, but rejects several of its premises (like methodological individualism). I found nothing “cringe inducing,” and several people seem to think that I have at least an OK grasp of Austrian ideas.
And while Misesian praxeology has roots in Thomism, but certainly Aquinas never would have accepted things the way Mises put them! (For instance, he was quite adamant that political society was instituted for the common good.)