Archive | October, 2007

I’d Like To Have An Argument, Please

I’m used to seeing this mangled phrasing from my students, but I would have hoped not to see it in a serious newspaper (I say “serious” to rule out, e.g., the Opelika-Auburn News, from which no fantastic garbling of English could any longer surprise me), and particularly not in the London Times: “Few would argue that the Dublin-born playwright, who spent much of his life in England, was the master of the clever quip.”

I’m not sure when people started using the phrase “few would argue that p” as though it meant “few would deny that p” or “few would argue against the proposition that p,” but in fact those who do have been saying the opposite of what they mean – since what “few would argue that pactually means is “few would maintain that p” or “few would argue on behalf of the proposition that p.”


Mises Was a Red

Cylon raiders over Grand Central Station 1. I’m back from the Misesfest (appropriately held next to Grand Central Station, which Mises used to cite as an example to illustrate Austrian methodology). Great conference! My contribution, “Mises as Radical: Retrospective on Rothbard’s Thesis,” is now online.

A few other items:

2. One of the two NYC hotels I stayed in (the less fancy one) had the following sign posted in the passenger elevator: “This is not a passenger elevator. It is unlawful for any person other than the operator or those necessary for handling freight to ride on this elevator.” A law not rigorously enforced, I guess.

3. I’m sad to see that Laissez Faire Books, whose catalogues I’ve been getting since I was an undergraduate, is going out of business. But on reflection it’s not surprising; I realise I haven’t ordered anything from them for quite a while, and I suspect that’s true of many others as well, and for the same reason – in the age of the internet it’s just not as crucial a resource as it used to be.

4. On the science-fiction front, check out some major spoilers for Galactica: Razor (conical hat tip to Norm Singleton) and rumours of a brand-new Dune movie.


Vienna on the Hudson

NYC Grand Hyatt Tomorrow I’m off to the Mises Institute’s 25th Anniversary Celebration in New York. Apart from the various talks by most of the iInstitute’s senior faculty, highlights include a bus tour of Misesian-Rothbardian landmarks; Guido signing his book; and some guy who’s running for President. I was asked to speak on the topic “Mises As Radical: Retrospective on Rothbard’s Thesis.” (For Mises’s radical side, see this piece; for his conservative side, see this one.) Später, gator!


Only Against Illegal Immigration?

Guest Blog by Jennifer McKitrick

There’s something fishy about some anti-immigration arguments.

NO AMNESTY - GO U.S.A.! - GO U.S. LAW! - GO HOME! They say “We’re not against immigration, we’re against illegal immigration.” OK, so the problem with immigrants is that they broke some laws. But are they good laws? If yes, they’re for laws designed to keep immigrants out, so they are against immigration. If no, then they should be for changing the laws. But they say changing the laws is either unacceptable “amnesty” for illegals that are already here and/or it would encourage more immigration. But the immigration that would happen then would be legal, so if they’re only against illegal immigration, they should have no problem.

So, I think I think that they are less than sincere when they say they are only against illegal immigration. Perhaps the right thing to say is that they only support the amount of immigration currently allowed by law. Which is pretty much being against immigration for the most part. But I suspect it’s really just lip service so they don’t seem so much like xenophobic racists. Of course, they want to protect American jobs, but preferring that companies pay higher wages to Americans rather than lower wages to needy non-Americans has no moral justification that I can see, and is probably based on racism as well.

Jennifer McKitrick is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, and Vice-President of the Molinari Institute and Molinari Society.


Getting Negative About Positive Economics

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Wrong again, Milton .... My QJAE article “Realism and Abstraction in Economics: Aristotle and Mises versus Friedman,” an Austro-Athenian critique of the late Milton Friedman’s 1953 essay “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” is now finally available online. (An early draft has been online for a while, but is now superseded by this final version.)

In response to complaints (e.g. from Austrians) that neoclassical economic models are unrealistic, Friedman had argued that economic models can’t be realistic because they must necessarily abstract from all the myriad details. I argue that Friedman’s reply is based on a confusion about the nature of abstraction that can be cleared up by appeal to the Aristotelean Scholastics’ distinction between precisive and non-precisive abstraction, a distinction revived in Ayn Rand’s theory of concept-formation as measurement-omission, and implicit in Ludwig von Mises’s criticism of Max Weber. I also make a few points about prediction vs. explanation and Friedman’s critique of apriorism.


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