Update 7

David Kramer’s blog post (cited below) has now, disappeared from the LRC archive. Possibly this is related to his quote about the Fed, since Peter Boettke, apparently, is for abolition of the Fed..at least, theoretically. Kramer might just have come across some quotes out of context. But it also seems that Boettke holds many positions…This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I’m willing to believe that he’s not a masquerading statist himself.  However, I still think the WSJ promotion of a Mercatus center professor is no accident.

Update 6

A friend of The Bell who also posts with insight here  responds to my post. I’ve chosen to create a new post to respond.

Update 5:

I’m posting below the money quote from Dr. Boettke’s response. It substantiates my earlier comments at Swiss libertarian newsletter The Daily Bell that yesterday’s WSJ piece about the Austrians had everything to do with defining the academic boundaries of what Austrian economics will be. The rest of Mises-on-the-web is to be swept under the carpet, along with Jon Stewart shows, raucous blogs, politicians, hard-money cranks, stock-tipster and other vulgar riff-raff. As these things go, it’s a fair enough statement..albeit a bit sniffy. Professor Boettke proposes peer-review and refereed journals as the gold-standard of intellectual truth.

“I have no doubt that many individuals are doing a better job spreading Austrian ideas in the popular imagination, and I am sure that there are individuals that are producing better scholarship as judged by my peers in the economics profession.  I never claimed otherwise. And, in fact, I have always tried to claim that judgments are always best left to one’s peers, rather than self-assessment.  And, I would like to add, I have tried to be fair in my own judgments of others within the Austrian movement and give credit where credit is due.  But again, I am myopically focused on publications — refereed publication; SSCI ranked journals preferred; or elite university presses. Again, this is all because of the advancement of Austrian ideas in the scientific literature of economics, not in the popular imagination. Perhaps advancing the ideas in the popular imagination requires something different than my admittedly myopic perspective.  I don’t know, but I am betting that for my purposes and that of my students we are going to keep pushing the academic mission.  I don’t want to show up on the Daily Show, nor do I want to appear on the Tonight Show, and I certainly do not want to run for political office. I also don’t offer investment advice by predicting the next downturn in the economy or anticipating the next upswing.  That is not the business I am in.  Others have a comparative advantage in such activities, I don’t.

I have also repeatedly claimed that I do not want to get involved in internet wars, nor do I believe that internet contributions on blogs, etc. are really helping us in the task that I do care about exclusively — advancing the cause of Austrian economics within the economics profession and academia.  I might be wrong.  In fact, I am somewhat caught in a contradiction because I am using blogging to try to pursue my goals of academic advancement of Austrian economics.  My only “defense” is that I try to cultivate a different type of conversation on this blog than what takes place on other Austrian oriented blogs, but I don’t always get what I would like in terms of the discourse.”

Here’s what I said in a comment at The Bell yesterday:

“Perhaps you analysis is erroneous there, because you assume
those distortions are aimed at bamboozling well-read and savvy readers. They aren’t.
They’re intended to establish the boundaries of polite discourse, beyond which it will/should not stray. These boundaries will establish where academic writers will go and who will or won’t be referenced…from wikipedia to journals.

The rewriting is also directed toward popular debate. People’s attention spans are short, most have only recently heard of Austrian economics, and if the WSJ can trade on its reputation to redirect such discussions to its own precincts, there’s nothing to lose.

By the miracle of self-referential citation compounded by google and wikipedia and the tendency of all debates to “move on,” history is constantly being revised in all things, petty and large.

There are only so many people who are spotting and undoing this kind of false history, and they can’t get to all of it fast enough and often enough to undo it completely.”
Update 4

Response by Peter Boettke, which argues that the responses below from Lew Rockwellians and The Daily Bell mischaracterize his position.

Response by Tibor Machan at The Daily Bell that The Brothers Koch held anarcho-capitalist views from conviction and not because it helped their business. Machan was responding to a Frank Rich piece in The New York Times that extrapolated from an extensive piece by Jane Meyer at The New Yorker on the Kochtopus.

Update 3:

Tom di Lorenzo sets the record straight on the supposed misbehavior of the loosey-goosey Austrians at an uptight occasion (see Wenzel’s blog below) that allegedly resulted in the displacement of LRC from the lap of academic favor.

As Lorenzo points out,  Boettke works at the Koch-funded Mercatus center at George Mason University. I pointed this out myself at The Daily Bell (see below), where the editors were inclined to see the article citing Boettke at the WSJ as sheer happenstance. Would that it were so…

The billionaire Koch brothers, their foundations and funding (the Kochtopus), and the Mises folks go back a long way…

Update 2

Here, Joe Salerno at Mises.org gets into more detail on Boettke’s positions and how Austrian they are.

Update 1

Meanwhile, Bob Wenzel cleverly inserts a photo of the very attractive Ms. Kelly Evans, author of the WSJ piece, into his take, which is that Boettke leads the “uptight” wing of the Austrians.

Wenzel, like The Daily Bell, has respect for Boettke himself and directs his scorn at the WSJ.

ORIGINAL POST:

David Kramer at Lew Rockwell blog points to a fascinating piece of intellectual chicanery from the Wall Street Journal. It manages to discuss Austrian economics without mentioning Von Mises, the Mises Institute, Murray Rothbard, or Lew Rockwell….but does cite Peter Boettke, a DC academic, and Schumpeter, who wasn’t even an Austrian…

KRAMER:

“After you’re done being perplexed by such a ridiculous question from me, let me ask you another question: Have any of you ever heard of Peter Boettke? I thought so. Though there are many of you who have also heard of Boettke, there are also many of you who have not—and I can assure you that you can go to your grave not fretting over that lack of knowledge.

Lila: I’ve actually linked to Peter Boettke a couple of times for pieces he had up at his blog Cato. But anything I learned from him is a cipher next to what I learned from Mises.org or Lewrockwell.com, which I had the great good fortune to discover in 2003. No disrespect meant to Professor Boettke. But a minimal regard for the truth demands that this bit of propaganda have a stake driven through its heart.

KRAMER:

Yet, “somehow,” one of the biggest One World Government propaganda rags—the War Street Journal—wrote a puff piece on Prof. Boettke of George Mason University who (according to this rag) “is emerging as the intellectual standard-bearer for the Austrian school of economic.” Perhaps in the minds of Peter Boettke and the folks at the War Street Journal. Now why in the world would the WSJ print such a baldfaced lie when Boettke could not even shine the shoes of the greatest living Austrian economists in the world today—Hans Hoppe, Walter Block, David Gordon, Joseph Salerno, Guido Hülsmann (I could go on)? Hmmm…could it be…could it be…could it be because Prof. Boettke is still a believer in one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on human civilization?

“The Fed, he [Boettke] says, should be to make money “as neutral as possible, like the rule of law, which never favors one party over the other.” [You see, folks, there’s a reason for everything. Now you know why the War Street Journal wouldn’t dare publish an article on any of the real Austrian economists I mentioned in the previous paragraph.]

And guess who is the only Austrian (albeit barely) economist that the rag mentions in conjunction with Boettke and the Austrian school of economics? Friedrich Hayek. You know, the “Austrian” economist who once stated that the welfare state works. (I have yet to find out if, at the very least, that was a qualified statement.) I guess that’s why the Socialist members of the Nobel Price committee gave Hayek the Nobel Prize in “Economics” rather than the exponentially superior Ludwig von Mises (the number one Austrian economist—and, for that matter, economist—in history) or Murray Rothbard (the number two Austrian economist—and, for that matter, economist—in history).

Here’s a bit of historical ”ignorance” in the article:

“Mr. Boettke “has done more for Austrian economics, I’d say, than any individual in the last decade,” says Bruce Caldwell, an editor of Mr. Hayek’s collected works.”

“Of course” he has. Forget about a man named Lew Rockwell who started The Mises Institute back in 1982, giving Austrian economists Hans Hoppe, Walter Block, David Gordon, Joseph Salerno, Guido Hülsmann, et al. a central location from which to promote the Austrian school of economics (which, at that time, barely anyone outside of academia—and many even inside academia—had ever even heard of). And forget about Lew Rockwell’s Austrian economics-promoting website lewrockwell.com, which happens to be the number one libertarian website in the world. Even Ron Paul has done more to bring Austrian economics to the attention of the public than Boetkke in the last decade. Of course, Lew and Ron want to end the fed, not “improve” it—as “Austrian” Prof. Boettke implies he wants to in his above-quoted statement.

Lila: A ferocious discussion at The Daily Bell on why (and how) Prof. Boettke might  differ from the Rockwellian/Paulian position.

KRAMER:

This propaganda piece intentionally omitting Mises, [sic] Rothbard, The Mises Institute, Llewellyn Rockwell, et al. in relation to the Austrian school of economics reminded me of two things—one personal and one public.

The personal: Many years ago a friend of mine (whom I suspected of being homosexual) wrote me a long letter about how he had met someone who he was in love with. Yet not only did he not mention the person’s name, he never once used a pronoun in the entire letter!! I wrote back to him goading him into telling me the person’s name. He wrote back to me mentioning the man’s name.

The public: I remember when Murray Rothbard died, The New York Slimes obituary “just happened” to come up with an extremely unflattering photo of Rothbard to accompany the obit rather than this standard one:

I guess it was one of those “unfortunate” lapses that are so “rarely” found in the One World Government media.

By the way, please don’t bother to write me any emails praising Peter Boetkke. I’m sure Peter’s done some fine work—but he is NO Mises, Rothbard, Hans Hoppe, Walter Block, David Gordon, Joseph Salerno, Guido Hülsmann, Robert Murphy, Stephan Kinsella, Roger Garrison, et al.

And when it comes to someone “who has done more for Austrian economics, I’d say, than any individual in the last decade,” the only person on this planet who can lay claim to that monumental, heroic achievement is LLEWELLYN ROCKWELL. (Except it hasn’t been a decade. It has been over a quarter of a century.)

UPDATE: John Grimsley wrote to me to point out a glaring omission in my post:

“You missed one thing in your recent blog post on lewrockwell.com: Peter Boettke isn’t even the “intellectual standard-bearer for the Austrian school of economics” at his own university. That would be Walter Williams.”