An excerpt from his post at Freebanking.org, Something Nice about Austrian Economics:
I know, I know: I haven’t been terribly kind to Austrian economics on this blog, or rather, I have been positively unkind to certain sorts of Austrian economists, and especially to Late Pleistocene types who insist, on a-priori grounds (and against all sorts of evidence to the contrary) that fractional reserve banking can’t work well, or wouldn’t survive in a free market, or is inherently fraudulent. But before you scold me again about my bad attitude, try trying to talk some sense into this bunch over a span of several decades, and then see if you’re still so inclined.
It’s also true that I no longer consider myself an “Austrian” economist, and that I haven’t done so for decades. I could list a dozen reasons why, starting with the shivers I get whenever I imagine being mistaken for a Homo-Austriapatheticus*, or some other sort of paleo-Austrian, and my aversion to even the slightest whiff of enthusiasm to use that term as Hume did. I’m convinced, furthermore, that the world would be better off if half of everything written containing the phrase “Austrian economics,” excepting works pertaining to the history of economic thought, had never been written, and if the rest had omitted the phrase. This last observation isn’t really as damning as it seems since, would that I could, I’d consign about two-thirds of all other academic writings on economics to oblivion. Still, I can’t blame my Austrian friends for wondering whether I have anything nice to say about their school of thought.
Which brings me to my purpose, which is to put my criticisms of Austrian economics into their proper perspective and, in doing so, to blow a raspberry or two at those other economists who pride themselves in their smug contempt for “Austrian economics”, and who, in displaying that contempt, can’t be troubled to distinguish the blatherings of the pre-Neolithic crowd from the enduring contributions of the School’s leading lights.
