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Just when you start to believe that all the clever people think like you... |
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 The Austrian School of Economics
Last week Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Josef Šíma and others were trying to convince that the world has not come up with anything better than free-market and money to support it. Courts, police, healthcare and public goods in general would be better managed if given to the hands of people to decide what’s best in a form of choice as oppose to central planning and management. To a non-economist but believer in market based solutions (such as carbon trading instead of environmental taxes in trying to address global pollution) a lot of that thinking makes sense but at the same time raises a lot of questions.
Why Austrian economists who introduced subjectivity and spontaneity to the concept of value are reluctant to discuss a possible enhancement of that theory by including things like environmental capital in the equation (or in other words internalise some of the externalities)? Why the value of resources is only to the extent of the human utility of them? Why they believe that the highest law is of private property and not the environmental law. This is very anthropocentric view of the world that I do not share, yet happy to explore and debate.
Still, the most memorable were words by prof. Josef Šíma, who is serving as an adviser to Czech minister of environment. He noted that change cannot come by being part of government or even advising it, it can only come by educating and informing people, spreading ideas amongst the public in a simple form in mass media, publishing in mainstream papers as oppose to writing articles for the benefit of few other academics who have nothing better what to do. People will ultimately choose what they need provided they have sufficient information. I guess that is what the Lithuanian Free Market Institute does. They might be right or wrong but they have an ideology and stick to it, for what I admire them immensely.
So what I am celebrating today is a very sober realization that considering the limitations of my time and the fact that I am more lawyer and sophist than economist, I am yet many many books and studies away from identifying my own allegiance to specific school of economic thought whether mainstream or laissez-faire, conservative, liberal or social. In fact, I think I should acknowledge straight away that I will never feel 100% true to myself by belonging to any of those and therefore should work hard to come up with my own school of thought based on the idea of sustainability, seeking for harmony of the world through maximizing beauty and pleasure in a broad sense. The only trouble is that it might be hard to find any followers, who are required by definition in order to have a school of thought.
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