So THAT’S What an Austrian Economist Should Be Doing

Some of the beltway “libertarians” associated with the George Mason University economics department have been involved in a sort of running internet smear campaign against anti-Fed Ron Paul supporters associated with the Mises Institute. They have even attempted to defame the work of the late Murray Rothbard, whose intellectual achievements in comparison to their own are like comparing an elephant to an ant. The current (November 2011) issue of Reason magazine includes an interview with George Mason economist Peter Leeson (p. 17) and describes what “real research” is like, George Mason-style.

“In a new working paper, [Leeson] joins co-authors Peter Boettke and Jayme S. Lemke, also of George Mason, to mount an economist’s defense of wife sales, a common practice in England during the 18th and 19th centuries . . .” “It appears that sales to the wife’s lover were very common,” Leeson is quoted as saying. “And that makes sense. The husband wants to sell the wife for the highest price he can get, to the person who values her the most . . .” But then again, there just might be someone else out there who values the wife even more than her current sex puppet (er, I mean, “lover”)  does, says Leeson, so that “the public auctioning element of wife sales becomes really important. . .”

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11:03 am on September 21, 2011