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Newsgroups: humanities.philosophy.objectivism
From: gsoll...@virginia.edu
Date: 1998/05/12
Subject: Re: To David Friedman: Antitrust
In article <199805120238.TAA21...@cybere.creative.net>, > Gordon Sollars wrote: > >Is there any evidence that the French economists you cite objected to the > Not that I know of, but there is no evidence that they would have objected coins and the French did not. This is not a lot to go on. > The point is that, unlike Smith, And it is quite possible that as Smith saw the beneficial effects of certain > the Physiocrats weren't demarcating whole areas of the economy as > being off-limits to private activity, so it is quite plausible to > infer from their theories that they would have reduced the state to > near-Randian levels, financially supported by a single tax on land. free market policies he would have advocated even more radical policies. (As Hayek did, ultimately endorsing competition in currency.) Making inferrences from the theory of the Physiocrats on matters which they didn't actually address may be a wonderful game, but perhaps one that is unfair to Smith. If we are going to test historical figures for free market purity, I think it would be best to confine ourselves to areas where we have both theory and data for the figures involved. > >Your Smith quote says nothing about *public* education. I'm curious; did I enjoy reading Rothbard in high dudgeon as much as the next libertarian, but > >your quote come from the Rothbard book you mentioned? > Yes. Rothbard implies that the context of this quote involved the I would suggest that it is a mistake to confuse this aspect of his writing with good scholarship. > >Was Turgot speaking of government in general, or of his experience with And perhaps the the Scots or the English, if they had been more familiar with > >French government in particular? That is, if Turgot had been in Scotland > >and Smith in France, what differences might we have seen in their writings? > As to the first question, I think it is fair to say that Turgot's theories them? > As for the "what if" scenario in your second question, it is But you find no difficulty in speculating about what detailed policies the > impossible to speculate intelligently about the outcome. For all we > know, both men might have pursued some completely different interest > than writing about economics. Physiocrats would have supported, based upon some knowledge of their theory? I think that fairly standard practice in interpreting a counterfactual is to make as few changes as possible. In this case, that would mean assuming that Smith and Torgot were still interested in economics, and asking what effect writing against a different background would have had on details of their views. I will go out on a limb and suggest that Rothbard never bothered to think through what that would have meant for specific policy recommendations by Smith or Turgot. > Aside from the question of how laissez-faire Smith was or might have been, Is there more than one economist who hangs out here? :-) Perhaps you mean > it is important to reiterate again that economics had risen to prominence > long before Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant (the point which gave rise to this > sub-thread). Rand really can't be blamed for falling victim to the > Smith-as-founder myth, but I would hope that the economists who hang out on > h.p.o. might reexamine it a bit more critically. > -- "students of Economics". ;-) Gordon Sollars -----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==----- You must Sign in before you can post messages.
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