Instead of a Reply

“There is no longer any excuse for Catholics to defend Von Mises,” says Dale Ahlquist, who goes on to recommend a book by a real estate agent as a more suitable classroom text in economics. Poor Otto von Habsburg, Crown Prince of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, and Bohemia. He called Mises “one of the truly great men of our century.” The Catholic nobleman Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, the polyglot author of Leftism Revisited, Liberty or Equality, and The Menace of the Herd, and something of a giant among twentieth-century intellectuals, spoke highly of Mises. Here he is on “The Cultural Background of Ludwig von Mises.” How the Catholic Churc... Thomas E. Woods Jr Best Price: $3.25 Buy New $30.80 (as of 06:30 UTC - Details) Kuehnelt-Leddihn and the Habsburgs, who lacked the opportunity to be lectured by the head of the Chesterton Society, praised Mises, whose works they had actually read first hand, not in secondhand caricature. More Catholic than the Habsburgs and Kuehnelt-Leddihn. What an example Dale Ahlquist is for us all! CHURCH & THE MARKET (S... Woods Jr., Thomas E. Best Price: $6.04 Buy New $101.04 (as of 04:20 UTC - Details) I bring this up because I’m in the midst of a bunch of attacks from a handful of critics like this, as persistent as they are wrongheaded, regarding my work on Catholic social teaching and Austrian economics. A few people have asked if I intend to reply to them. My answer: I already have. There is no point in continuing. Every one of their objections is dealt with in “Economics as Science: A Catholic Defense of the Free Market,” “Faith and Liberty,” “Catholic Social Teaching and the Market Economy Revisited: A Reply to Thomas Storck,” “On the Actual Progress of Peoples,” “Capitalism and Catholicism,” “Morality and Economic Law: Toward a Reconciliation,” and “Is Thomas Woods a u2018Dissenter’?” Also relevant is the 2005 essay “Heavens Above! The Relation of Ethics and Economics,” by Gerard Casey, then head of the department of philosophy at University College, Dublin. And I did write an entire book on this – The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy. That book covers prices, wages, labor unions, foreign aid, money, banking, business cycles, inflation, socialism, distributism, “predatory pricing,” and scores of other topics, and can serve as an introductory text for the student interested in Austrian economics. On specific individuals, see “Catholic Social Teaching and the Market Economy Revisited: A Reply to Thomas Storck” and “On Chris Ferrara” (the link I recommend if you click only one). In all these cases, I am reminded of what Richard Tawney said about Martin Luther: “Confronted with the complexities of foreign trade and financial organizations, he is like a savage introduced to a dynamo or a steam engine. He is too frightened and angry even to feel curiosity. Attempts to explain the mechanism merely enrage him; he can only repeat that there is a devil in it, and that good Christians will not meddle with the mystery of iniquity.”

January 8, 2011