Roderick Long

Quotes From

“Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (2001)

• Just as the kinematic diagram does not assert that the machine’s parts really are rigid, but only says that if, and to the extent that, they are rigid, the machine will behave as predicted, so likewise a economic theory does not assert that human beings have any particular aims, but only that if, and to the extent that, they have such-and-such aims, they will behave in certain ways.#
• If I will to have contradictory beliefs or contradictory volitions, that will be rational in the Misesian sense but irrational in, say, the Kantian sense. #
• No “analytic” use of a concept is intelligible unless it is embedded in a network of “synthetic” uses of that same concept.#
• The analytic/synthetic distinction itself presupposes a separability of concept from application that cannot be sustained.#
• We cannot justify our language by pointing to its reflection of extralinguistic reality, because it is only in and through language that we can do such pointing.#
• A mind that “consists of rules” cannot intelligibly be interpreted either as making rules (as though it might have left them unmade), or as having rules imposed on it (as though it might have been free of them).#

“Realism and Abstraction in Economics” (2006)

• Those who criticize neoclassical models for their lack of realism are not seeking a precisive abstraction that more closely approximates reality; rather, they are seeking an abstraction that is not precisive at all. The right question to ask is not “How closely should our theories approximate reality in order to yield useful predictions?” but rather “How much specificity should our theories incorporate in order to yield useful explanations?”#
• [E]conomic laws … are not relations between earlier and later events, but rather between actual and counterfactual events … There is no guarantee, for example, that a minimum wage law will cause unemployment in the sense of making unemployment higher than it was before the law; for the level of unemployment is influenced by many different factors, some countervailing. What economic law does guarantee is that the level of unemployment will be higher under a minimum wage law than it would have been without the law.#

“Corporations Versus the Market, or, Whip Conflation Now” (2008)

• Competition to establish a legal monopoly is no more genuine market competition than voting – one last time – to establish a dictator is genuine democracy#
• When a private entity is granted special governmental privileges, “deregulating” it amounts instead to an increase, not a decrease, in governmental intrusion into the economy.#

“Regulation: The Cause, Not the Cure, of the Financial Crisis” (2008)

• Attempting to cure an illness by artificially simulating symptoms of health is, literally, voodoo economics.#