The debate still continues. It is all about Mises’ initial article and then book on Socialism in 1922. He demonstrated the necessity of the price system and showed how subjective values were transformed into objective prices which could be used as meaningful cardinal numbers in economic calculation.
Gene Callahan recounts a forgotten period of intellectual history when the obsession with modelling crowded out the search for truth.
Monetary inflation is the key way to bring about economic fascism. Fascism was a spending, borrowing government, militarism, imperialism, and a planned economy. Keynes’ followers came to power in the 60s with the Kennedy administration. Nixon went on to impose wage and price controls.
Prior to Mises there had been nothing written on the theory of monopoly price. Mises felt there could be some limited times of monopoly on the free market, e.g. diamond mines, but Rothbard felt that there could not be monopolies. Both theories developed out of Menger’s original thoughts.
Monetary theory is where Austrians diverge the most from mainstream. Mises built a new taxonomy of money. He said money included any checking account deposits. The marginal utility of gold on the last day of barter was determined by the uses of gold. People then demanded gold as money because there was preexisting value. A paper dollar must have such a connection to money. Government cannot create money. Money is not neutral. The natural trend of prices in a market economy is falling.
Where the classical economists had gone wrong was to speak of goods as if they were abstract classes. The Austrians noted that their value theory did not talk about concrete units and could not explain how individuals valued goods.
There were reasons for the decline of the Austrian School before its revival and rebirth by Mises and Rothbard. There was an Israel Kirzner view in the 1970s that the Keynesian avalanche had buried Austrian economics in 1936. Then there is a big bang theory of its rebirth in 1974 due to the South Royalton meeting and Hayek receiving the Nobel Prize.
For the editors of The Changing Face of Economics (Colander, Holt, and Rosser, University of Michigan Press, 2004) "cutting edge" is more than a phrase.
Mahoney argues that although Mises correctly conceived of value as an ordinal relation, precluding the possibility of value imputation, in many of his expositions of the market process he adopts a notion of value as a cardinal thing in explaining the task confronting actors in either the planned or unplanned economy.
A common rejoinder to the program of laissez-faire is that market failures require government intervention. Just what does market failure mean, asks Gil Guilory.
