Sunday, July 29, 2012

Peter Klein as Suicide Bomber

The George W. Bush Institute is out with a book, The 4% Solution, that is a collection of essays by various economists, mostly Keynesians and econometricians.

Somehow among these interventionists, an essay by Peter Klein is included.

Perhaps, this should not come as a surprise.

The first paragraph of Klein's essay mentions organizations conducting "important" research: the World Bank, the Federal Reserve, the European Commission, the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development.

He then favorably quotes the war criminal Donald Rumsfeld.

But before you throw up your hands in disgust at the Mises Institte scholar Klein, may I suggest that Klein has thrown these names into his essay to get past the front door and into the party. Because once Klein is through the door his essay evolves into a brilliant attack on all things interventionist.

His discussion of entrepreneurship is decidedly Austrian with his highlighting the work of Mises, Schumpeter, Kirzner and Lachmann.

He manages to include in his essay a mention of the Austrian business cycle theory developed by Mises and Hayek. He spends the rest of the essay blowing up other types of government interventions.

In other words, Klein has gotten to the core and blown up bomb after bomb at the interventionist policy suggestions made by others in the book. That Klein may still be alive after this attack should not down play the daring it took to speak truth to interventionists. It may, however, attest to the skillfulness with which he was able to enter the interventionist lair, place the bombs without the others noticing his attack, until much too late. If they have even, yet, noticed what he has done.

4 comments:

  1. this is the same strategy that you have harshly criticized rand paul for...

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    Replies
    1. Exactly when did Rand Paul attack the interventionists?

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    2. Actually in Rand's national review piece Rand criticized intervention and RW criticized him for choosing that particular media outlet which is known for intervention.

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    3. Try again when you find Peter Klein writing in a journal or book where his father has been attacked. As far as I know the George W. Bush Institute has never attacked Klein's father the way NRO attacked Rand's father.

      Secondly, please let me know when Rand writes in the belly of the beast and attacks it for its war mongering, the way Klein takes it to the heart of the Keynesians and econometricians.

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