Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Salon's Andrew Leonard Promises to Take Ludwig von Mises to the Beach!

EPJ reader Dale Fitzgerald informs me that he sent a copy of my post, Ludwig von Mises as a Racist, to the editor of Salon, who sent it on to Andrew Leonard.

My post was in response to an Andrew Leonard piece where he quoted from the Mises book Human Action. The quote he took was the following:
It must be emphasized that the destiny of modern civilization as developed by the white peoples in the last two hundred years is inseparably linked with the fate of economic science.

Leonard follows this quote up with this:
Never mind the puzzling injection of skin color into the argument.

In my post, I provide the background as to why Mises would have introduced skin color at that spot in his book.

Fitzgerald tells me Leonard emailed him saying that he plans to update his article with my explanation as to what really was going on. According to Fitzgerald, he also said in his email:
I assure you, I  will bring "Human Action" with me to the beach on my next excursion.

7 comments:

  1. I'm guessing he never goes to the beach.

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  2. Well, now we know Leonard knows nothing of Mises. Who would wittingly offer to lug a 30 pound book to the beach? [Free audio version is here, Leonard: http://mises.org/media/category/139/Human-Action-A-Treatise-on-Economics]

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  3. Awww.
    At least, he has a sense of humor.

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  4. Human Action is thick but it surely doesn't weigh 30 pounds...more like 2. But it IS worth its weight in gold.

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  5. If he were serious he would do a retraction before his vacation. How would he feel if someone called him a racist? Or does the charge mean nothing to him? Judging by his frivilous and plainly unresearched use of the term he plainly doesn't care what he says or writes about anyone. Maybe he belongs on the bench, not the beach.

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  6. There's a nice pocket edition of Human Action available for him at mises.org

    Heck, he could even get the pocket edition of Rothbard's Man, Economy and State :-)

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  7. First, Bachmann is a total moron judging by her crazed statements supporting Israel.
    I doubt she ever could read Human Action.
    Second, that high school girl in New Jersey would have wiped the floor with Bachmann if Bachmann had accepted her invitation to debate the Constitution.
    Third, there are serious racial differences and 'racism' is an invented leftist term from the 1930s. And economics is not everything.

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