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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

This almost reads like a parody. It's as if the author completely disregards the fact that the Austrian school exists at all.

I particularly like the reference to the 'deflationary' nature of the Great Depression while glossing over the fact that the prescribed solution (the establishment of a central bank) occurred less than two decades before it.

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All serious economists disregard the Austrian school. And with good reason - they're kooks.

There was a central bank during the great depression but the US was still on the gold standard until 1933. When it went off the gold standard the great depression stopped getting worse and started getting better: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/09/yes-recovery-in-the-gr...

> It's as if the author completely disregards the fact that the Austrian school exists at all.

Because they don't really, they're cranks, not a serious field of study. The Austrian school is equivalent to the flat earth society. Their answer to every possible economic issue is the same, the magic market will heal itself. When you have one answer for everything, you don't get to call yourself a serious field of study.

I think it's important to distinguish between historic Austrians, like Hayek, and the nutjob libertarian variety that tried to turn economics into an apologia for anarchocapitalism, like Rothbard.

I'll make the distinction if you'll explain to me what Hayek proposes other than let the market handle it. From what I've seen, they're all cranks, Hayek included.

The Austrian school of thought is little more than don't touch the market, you'll break it, it's magic and it'll always work. That's not a serious field of study; that's a golden hammer theory.

Hayek is tendentious, but he made substantive contributions to the science. Rothbard didn't even do that: he was a libertarian political activist masquerading as an economist.

You've already said that, but that's not what I asked, I asked what those contributions were beyond "the magic market will fix it".

For one, he seems to have developed the theory of price signals.

Falls under let the magic market handle it, I asked for something outside that.

Cap and trade basically hacks price signals by enforcing the notion that there's a finite supply of the environment's ability to absorb pollutants. Without the notion of price signals, cap and trade is not the type of thing you'd think to use, and the distinction I was making was that later Austrians, like Rothbard, never contributed anything of the like.

You can make whatever distinctions you want--this digression has gotten tiresome and I regret ever responding to you in the first place.

And by most historic interpretations, that centralization actually caused it.

Citation.

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