Summoned to Service by TOFF Funds and Aristocratic Bells

Abstract

‘Von’ Mises contemptuously asserted that the university ‘enterprise’ of economic political science held a ‘strong attraction to halfwits.’ It is, however, usual to presume that a ‘free’ market Professor of Economics has genuinely earned the educational qualifications that underpin their title. It is also unusual (and possibly praiseworthy) for a University Professor of Economics to have failed to gain university admission or to have failed their undergraduate degree in economics. But when pattern recognition (and thus pattern prediction) reveals a school-based portal, does this suggest that the Austrian business model aims to reduce the transaction costs of acquiring educational qualifications? According to the George Mason University Professor of Economics, Don Boudreaux (a Café Hayek blogger and one of Hayek’s ‘secondhand dealers in opinion’): ‘Scientific data undermine’ the ‘assertion’ that ‘Secondhand smoke kills!’ And according to the co-founder of the Mises Institute, Llewellyn Rockwell Jr., there was a final ‘free’ market solution to externalities: ‘anyone who is personally harmed, or his business damaged, by air pollution ought to be able to sue to stop it, and receive damages.’ But as his fellow, Mises Institute co-founder, Murray Rothbard, observed (when feeling helpless in the face of what he asserted were Charles Koch’s crimes): ‘How do you sue a billionaire?’ (Frontlines May 1981). Hayek encouraged his ‘secondhand dealers in opinion’ to use the ‘knowledge’ that externalities had been invented by a Soviet agent—despite knowing that this ‘knowledge’ had been promoted by a fraud. And ‘free’ market promoters openly express contempt for those they have colonised—when they think that only the ideologically correct are listening. This chapter suggests that we need a systematic study of the social origins and psychological predispositions of Austrian School recruits.