My erstwhile colleague Chris Ferrara has written a book called The Church and the Libertarian, which is in fact an attack on the Austrian School of economics. If you know the author’s other work, it is what you would expect. Now comes Tony Flood, who is dismantling the book page by page. He is barely into the book and has already found the author guilty of (among many, many other things):
— criticizing Carl Menger (whose price theory is just common sense and entirely unobjectionable) on the basis of an unfinished student project at Hebrew University, a project whose author thinks so little of that she does not mention it on her c.v., and then ineptly and unknowingly choosing the non-Catholic side of a dispute he knows nothing about;
— ignoring the tributes to Murray Rothbard, and even the open anarchism, of Joseph Sobran, which might have confused the story of iniquity he has determined to tell;
*From one of Sobran’s tributes: “I could praise him all day and still feel I’d hardly told you a thing about him. He was hilarious, he was sweet, he was endlessly energetic and stimulating and startling…. May the world catch up with him.”
— after having allegedly studied the Austrian School exhaustively, still not understanding what economic law is:
“The ‘laws’ of economics,” Ferrara writes, “are not moral laws, violation of which would have moral consequences for the ‘violator.'”
Um, does any Austrian say anything like this about economic laws? This is a straw man that appeals to the ignorant: That Ferrara is sticking it to those Austrians and their so-called economic laws!
To learn what is meant by economic law, click here.
Ferrara seems to be saying that of course these so-called economic laws are not laws at all, and that in building the great society we may cast them aside as imaginary constructs designed to fasten the oppressions of capitalism on us all. If that is the case, I am interested to know how he plans to shake his fist at the Law of Returns, or the law by which inflation of the money supply makes prices higher than they would otherwise be, or the law by which a division-of-labor society is more physically productive than a non-division-of-labor society. The very idea is nonsensical, and proves — as if proof were necessary — that the author is more interested in demonization, and in writing the typically tendentious lawyer’s brief, than he is in advancing knowledge.
— thinking Mises’ reference to the “imaginary construction” of a free-market economy means Mises thinks such a thing cannot or does not exist in reality;
— misstating to the point of absurdity what praxeology is; it is, of course, not “based on subjective utility theory.” Most of his readers, knowing nothing about praxeology, will doubtless think the author, who tosses around technical terms like these, has really mastered the subject matter. They will not know that an actual Austrian would laugh and shake his head at this misunderstanding. An author should at least know the first thing about the most foundational issue of the debate in which he is engaged.
And yet there were Catholic academics who endorsed this book. This is beyond laughable. To lend support to a crude, propagandistic, uninformed, uncharitable, confused jumble of vitriol and straw men, and ignorantly describing such a book as a devastating takedown of a venerable tradition of thought these academics do not know the first thing about, is a grotesque betrayal of the very mission of the university.
