I have affiliations with a lot of different organizations that are sometimes at odds with one another: the Mises Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Koch Foundation, the Independent Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, and others. On more than one occasion, I have used money from Koch Foundation grants to buy Mises Institute books for students. I have nothing but gratitude for the donors who have given so generously to advance the missions of these organizations. I have written before about my optimism with respect to the future and how the ideas with which we are dealing are far too important and the consequences are far too serious to spend a lot of time dwelling on squabbles and mud-slinging within the movement for liberty.
Truth Matters. Right now, someone somewhere in the world is learning about socialism as if Mises and Hayek never existed. Probably millions of people are going through high school and college without ever encountering, even if only to reject it, the notion that marginal productivity has anything to do with wage determination.
Consequences Matter. The Bible is pretty severe in its condemnation of those who oppress the poor. The great tragedy is that a lot of people are oppressing the poor while thinking that they are actually doing good. The unintended consequences of minimum wages, price controls, and trade restrictions are well known--or at least they should be. It should never be forgotten that for tens of millions of people, the twentieth century was a century of starvation and mass slaughter. I’ve recently thought a lot about the fact that someone, somewhere in the world is suffering because I chose, at some point in the past, to waste time rather than do something productive. In Misesian terms, someone is experiencing serious “felt uneasiness” that could have been alleviated had I chosen a different course of action at some point in the past when I just chose to waste time. The Bible tells us to count the cost of any action. The cost of wasting time is not trivial.
Fighting is Lousy Economics. While you’re making “Kochtopus” jokes, students and others around the world are learning that minimum wages and price controls help the poor, that labor unions created the American middle class, that war is good for the economy, and that socialism is a viable alternative to the free market. I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, to think it possible that working against the Koch brothers might not be the best use of your time. As for the insults, backbiting, and all that, I think there are junior high schoolers around the country who have it covered.
Scholarship, outreach, and commentary are different. When we’re talking about intellectual history in a seminar room, a classroom, or at a conference where papers are being presented that will someday be submitted for publication in scholarly journals, it’s probably worthwhile to talk about the very fine points of agreement and disagreement between Mises, Hayek, Kirzner, Rothbard, and others. Public commentary and outreach probably aren’t the places to have debates about whether F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman were sufficiently hardcore. The average (and marginal!) reader of a daily newspaper probably isn’t worried about where Mises and Hayek diverged on the socialist calculation debate or whether Milton Friedman should be banished from the libertarian pantheon for his views on a negative income tax and school vouchers. The average (and marginal!) reader of a daily newspaper probably thinks that minimum wages help the poor, that Japan and Germany China and India are going to take all our jobs, and that communism was a noble idea that worked in theory.
We Can Do Better. In my faculty spotlight interview, I mentioned that someday my children are going to grow up and ask what I did about the absolutely horrible things people do to one another. I said that I want to be able to say something other than “I changed the channel.” I also want to be able to say something other than “I trolled the comments sections on a bunch of blogs and had nasty fights with a bunch of people with whom I mostly agree.” I don’t expect to rebuild bridges that were burned years ago. Perhaps I’m being naive. I do know this: I’m not going to play these games. There is far too much at stake.
