Economist Brad DeLong has come out swinging against Austrian economics again, and once again he’s punched himself in the face. But he’s too numb to realize it. There’s a great response on the Mises Economics Blog by Jonathan Catalán, and I take a stab on my site, Wirkman Netizen.
It’s interesting that neither Catalán nor I attack, in our respective longer efforts, the worst calumny of DeLong’s, his insinuation that the Austrian distrust of fiat money comes down to anti-Semitism: “[I]n its scarier moments this train of thought slides over to: ‘good German engineers (and workers); bad Jewish financiers.’”
Since Mises was a Jew, and was treated badly for anti-Semitic reasons at times — why does DeLong think Mises left Austria? — and that Mises never, ever supported anti-Semitism (nor did Hayek, for that matter), this is especially vile. It’s just another example of those leaning left (which means: technocrats who mislabel themselves as “liberals” and “progressives”) playing the racism/anti-semitism card when they lack a good hand.
DeLong should be ashamed of himself. But, then, one of the perks of being in the managerial class of the technocratic state means never having to say you are sorry.
Wirkman Virkkala is a freelance editor and propagandist living in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. Formerly a founding editor of Liberty magazine, he has written for Reason, The American Enterprise, and the late, great Loompanics Unlimited Catalog, as well as many other sites and publications.
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Odd that he makes the same argument about Karl Marx, also of Jewish ancestry. But I think that both DeLong (for bringing up anti-Semitism in the first place) and Virkkala (for continuing to talk about it here) are trying to distract readers from the real issue. DeLong does have a good point: the Austrians (like the Marxists) make value judgements about money. The Liberian Standard would do better to address that directly.