Raico: Rethinking Churchill, https://mises.org/library/rethinking-churchill
Liberty, Nov. 1997: Raico rely to Palmer? Mises and MonarchY; http://www.libertyunbound.com/sites/files/printarchive/Liberty_Magazine_November_1997.pdf [http://www.libertyunbound.com/node/363] also here in text: https://web.archive.org/web/20050206104444/http://www.libertysoft.com/liberty/features/62raico.html
reply to Palmer’s bashing of Mises Inst/rockwell Sep. 1997: http://www.libertyunbound.com/sites/files/printarchive/Liberty_Magazine_September_1997.pdf
Palmer: Lew rockwell’s Vienna Waltz, https://web.archive.org/web/20050209061244/http://www.libertysoft.com/liberty/features/61palmer.html Liberty Setp. 1997
palmer reply: For Mises’ Sake Jan 1998: http://www.libertyunbound.com/sites/files/printarchive/Liberty_Magazine_January_1998.pdf
raico pic w/ ptak and reisman: https://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.damico.9/posts/10103218252088967?comment_id=10103219132574467&reply_comment_id=10103219416056367&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R8%22%7D
Raico flagpole story: https://www.facebook.com/nskinsella/posts/10154054622938181?hc_location=ufi
David Gordon, The History of Our Movement
Raico grew up in the Bronx, but in contrast with the leftist views common in his family’s apartment building and neighborhood, he acquired from an early age a sympathetic grasp of the isolationist wing of the Republican Party. In high school, he joined Youth for Taft, where he encountered George Reisman. While still in high school, Raico and Reisman became interested in Mises, and Raico describes their hilarious attempt to meet Mises, in the guise of door-to-door salesmen for The Freeman.
The attempt failed, but they soon were able to join Mises’s famous seminar at New York University. Here Raico met someone who became one of the dominant intellectual influences on his life—Murray Rothbard. The incredible range of Rothbard’s scholarship, as well as his enthusiasm and humor, impressed Raico deeply. Rothbard was the first person Raico had met who defended “a fully voluntary society—nudge, nudge.”
Raico, along with Reisman, Ronald Hamowy, and several others, became members of the Circle Bastiat and met regularly with Rothbard. When Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged appeared in 1957, Rothbard and his followers met for a while with Rand and her group, “The Collective,” but Rothbard and the Randians soon clashed. He refused their demand that he divorce his wife Joey, who had committed the unpardonable sin of being a Christian.
Raico did his graduate work at the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago, with Friedrich Hayek as his major professor. He found Hayek “more interested in his own research than teaching” and, although friendly, somewhat remote. While at Chicago, he founded the New Individualist Review, which became one of the best of all classical-liberal journals. He was able to attract such luminaries as Hayek and Milton Friedman to contribute.
Listeners to the recording will catch the nostalgia Raico feels for his first teaching position at Wabash College; the quality of the students there was never matched in his later career at Buffalo State College. Raico also describes his many trips to Europe, and listeners will especially enjoy his account of the Gaudi buildings in Barcelona. While in Europe, he lectured widely. Raico became the foremost expert on the history of nineteenth-century German liberalism and published Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School.
Like Rothbard, Raico has been very closely associated with the Mises Institute. The recording conveys a clear impression of Raico’s intelligence and wit. Listening to it is almost like meeting Ralph Raico in person.
Some classics posts:
Switzerland, Immigration, Hoppe, Raico, Callahan
Raico: Grow Up, Canada https://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/06/grow-up-canada/
introduction to the classic JLS immigration debate https://www.stephankinsella.com/2007/09/boudreaux-on-hoppe-on-immigration/
Raico Cleans Tom Palmer’s Clock www.stephankinsella.com/2003/08/raico-cleans-tom-palmer’s-clock/
Raico on checkpoint charlie: https://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/11/hoppe-on-east-vs-west-germany-and-the-fall-of-the-wall/
re: Raico Cleans Tom Palmer’s Clock
Tom DiLorenzo is right on in his comments on Raico v. Palmer.
In his reply to Raico, Palmer savagely attacked Hoppe — in part because Hoppe maintains the absurd and non-Austrian view that free market unemployment is “always voluntary.”
Palmer and I corresponded over a year ago about another issue, but Hoppe came up. After I defended Hoppe, Palmer wrote me: “[…] who could take a self-described economist seriously when he writes that unemployment is impossible in a free market? And when he claims that that’s somehow an implication of Austrian economics he adds insult to ignorance. […] The fact is that Mr. Hoppe is an embarrassment.”
In a reply to Palmer, I pointed out that Mises, in Human Action (Chapter XXI. WORK AND WAGES, Section 4. Catallactic Unemployment, p. 599), explicitly stated: “UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE UNHAMPERED MARKET IS ALWAYS VOLUNTARY“. Clearly Hoppe’s view on unemployment is the same as Mises’. Is Mises supposed to be an embarrassment to Austrian economics too?
Palmer’s reply to this? “For Mr. Hoppe it is a cult based on reading and interpreting sacred texts, the point of which is to ‘master Misesian economics.’ […] I don’t really give a fig about what Mises said just because it’s what he said; what I care about is whether what he wrote helps me to understand the world. […] You write, ‘And it is more than an implication of Austrian economics–it is Mises’ actual, express, explicit view, in his magnum opus.’ If you’re right, then so what? Is that an argument? If you’re right about this, then Mises was wrong. Is that so hard to accept?”
Note that Palmer himself attacked Hoppe’s pedigree as a free-market economist, indeed, as an Austrian economist, by citing Hoppe’s allegedly absurd and non-Austrian view that involuntary unemployment is impossible on a free market. When I simply pointed out that Mises himself had the same view, I was clearly not citing Mises to prove that proposition is correct, but to show that this view is not “an embarrassment to Austrian economics,” but is rather the view of one of the premiere Austrian economists. Palmer is the one who brought up pedigree; when I showed that his argument was flawed, he retreated to the charge that my citing Mises is cult-like. Need anything else be said?
Raico Cleans Tom Palmer’s Clock
Wow. Ralph Raico really kicked Tom Palmer’s ass in that exchange posted by Lew. Palmer’s “last word” addressed none — NONE — of Ralph’s main points, but only spewed hatred and bile at Lew and Hans Hoppe. He comes off as an intemperate fool, in contrast to Ralph’s terrific scholarship.
I don’t believe Palmer has any formal educational training in economics, so it is not surprising that he resorts to quoting anonymous friends and Mark Skoussen to criticize Hoppe. On the issue of involuntary unemployment that he brings up, it’s worth noting that in Human Action Mises did clearly state that all unemployment is voluntary in a genuinely free market, as Hoppe has written. Palmer and Skoussen may disagree, but they are blowing smoke if they say this is not a Misesian position.
Palmer is pathetic in quoting an anonymous source as calling Hoppe’s book a “logical fallacy” without citing a single example to illustrate his point. Sounds to me like he’s never read a page of the book he is criticizing.
Palmer accuses Hoppe of bad manners, while beginning his critique of Hoppe by calling him a “pig.” I guess his definition of good manners is to always begin a debate by comparing one’s intellectual opponents to swine!
Cato v. Kaiser
The Lottieri-Stagnaro article today on Franz Joseph reminded me of a funny attack by Cato’s Tom Palmer. The heroic Ralph Raico responded, and then Mr. Palmer had the last word.
Is Market Unemployment Always Voluntary?
October 1, 2004 7:56 AM by David J. Heinrich | Other posts by David J. Heinrich | Comments (22)
I asked the following question on a discussion list:
In one of Tom Palmer’s flames of Stephan Kinsella, Palmer accused Hoppe of being an “embarassment to Austrian economists” because he believed that in the unhampered free market, all unemployment would be voluntary (Hoppe’s statement here). Kinsella cited a passage from Mises showing that this is what Mises thought (“unemployment in the unhampered market is always voluntary”), and hence, such a view could not possibly be an embarassment to Austrians.
I’m interested in what people think about that statement itself, that in the unhampered free market, all unemployment is voluntary.
I’m not so sure about this statement. What about the severely mentally retarded? Who’s going to employ them? Or those in the terminal stages of Alzheimer’s? The argument is that people can lower their wages until someone will hire them. But these kinds of people are liabilities — so they’d actually have to pay the company for the inconvenience of having them befuddle things (and I don’t think we can construe employment to mean an anti-productive person compensating the company he “works for” for his daily detraction from profits).
Likewise, when a Stephan Hawking (tragically) loses all of his muscle-control, he would be unemployable, even in an unhampered free market (unless someone finds a way to interface a computer to his mind).
So, am I just misinterpretting Mises here, or is there something wrong with my reasoning, or is it that Mises just wasn’t considering these extreme cases?
* * * * *
John Egger of Towson State offered the following point of clarification:
Everything hinges on how one defines “voluntary,” and the fact that we use special terminology when we’re discussing the buying and selling of human labor doesn’t help. (Either Henry Hazlitt or Thomas Sowell suggested that our thinking would be much improved if we replaced “hiring an employee” with “buying some labor,” “getting a job” with “selling some labor,” etc.)The crux of the matter is that employment is a voluntary exchange… and that requires the voluntary participation of BOTH the potential buyer and the potential seller. If the potential seller is willing but the potential buyer is not, it’s tempting to conclude that the potential seller “involuntarily” fails to sell; after all, HE wants to. But the potential buyer clearly “voluntarily” doesn’t buy. So what is it… voluntary or involuntary?
My conclusion is that the failure to exchange is, indeed, “voluntary,” because a voluntary exchange requires that BOTH parties agree. If both OR EITHER do not, the failure to exchange (which the potential seller of labor will call “unemployment”) is, indeed, voluntary.
This does not imply that the potential worker scans over a wide range of employment opportunities and consciously chooses not to sell his labor, as classical-inspired interpretations might suggest.
