Austrian critics

Copy cái này lại để dành sau này cãi nhau với bác Đinh Tuấn Minh :-)

"The Austrian school spend so much time arguing over what the true Austrian view is and who are the ‎true forefathers (Rothbard, Mises, etc), that they leave everyone confused about what Austrian economics ‎is all about.‎

I tend to think of Austrian economics as a cult or religion that has splintered into multiple factions over ‎the years. The three common threads between these factions are radicalism, an undying belief that the ‎market fixes everything and an abhorrence of organised economic or political institutionalism of any kind. ‎The third of these three threads is inherently contradictory in that it refuses to acknowledge that the block ‎that capitalist success has been built on, the corporation, is the most fundamental of all institutions and its ‎success is based on a centralised and dictatorial decision making process. The criteria for success that ‎Austrian school members judge themselves by is the distance their views exist from mainstream thought ‎and these criteria have little to offer in terms of workable economic solutions.‎

Austrian economics bemoans, perhaps in some instances justifiably, the centralization of public services ‎that has occurred in developed nations since World War I but refuses to acknowledge that successive ‎electorates have voted in these changes. In their utopian vision of the world a gold-backed money supply ‎would eliminate the business cycle and gold-miners would be immune to the corruptive forces central ‎bankers are exposed to. Their depiction of the central banker as the demonic puppet master at the hands ‎of the base money pump fails to acknowlede that, historically, bank failures have been caused by gold-‎hoarding on the part of the public in times of crisis and a lack of a lender of last resort during financial ‎crises. In the real world central bankers do indeed attempt to control short term interest rates but they are ‎generally guided by the market. The future path of the central bank rate on average does not vary all that ‎much from the market derived yield curve.‎

Business cycles happen. At the top of a business cycle lending gets ahead of itself and when the ‎realization hits that some of these loans can't be paid back, there is a liquidity crunch which usually causes ‎a recession. This happens regardless of whether loans were made as gold or fractional reserve based ‎deposits. The primary difference between central bank controlled fractional reserve lending and gold ‎based lending is that when liquidity crises occur the former has evolved over time to offer backstop ‎solutions to destructive deflationary effects inherent in liquidity crises whereas the latter offers no such ‎solutions.‎"

Charlie Browne

Update (8/4): Krugman cho rằng Austrian là self-denial Keynesian.