I second the above comment, I had to stop reading the comments on the article as to not ruin my morning.

Excellent article. The comments section, however, is quite depressing. I had to stop reading after a half dozen comments, there was such a high level of ignorance.

Great article with terrible comments.

My favorite:
If this were any industry other than finance, the Bank of England would be seen as the Soviet-style planning board that it is.

i sometimes wonder how austrian economists survive in the dishonest environment of their statist colleagues day in and day out. they have to be pachyderms to keep taking the nonsense without throwing up.

crony capitalism is the institutional and cultural framework in which private companies and government act in concert to benefit each other at the expense of consumers and taxpayers.
insider trading has nothing to do with it. insider trading is an artificial crime created by regulators. using your insider knowledge to acquire or sell shares generates better prices in their role of signals / incentives.

Are there no “Austrians” in the UK? Maybe Mises can launch a satellite office. I know that the Libertarian Alliance is in London, but I don’t see them commenting on the Guardian site.

Here’s the comment that caused me to stop reading:

“I think people with this kind of mindset should be top of the queue for a pre-frontal lobotomy.”

Those of you who gave up reading the comments, I encourage you to persevere as I jumped in and began responding to several of the commentators. But there’s a lot to wade through…

The Mises Institute would do well to help coordinate Austrian economists like myself in the UK – aside from the IEA, the ASI and other established think tanks also look out for The Cobden Centre.

http://www.cobdencentre.org/

The reason the comments are so depressing is because this was published in the hard-left newspaper “The Guardian”.

It’s a bit of a joke in the UK, but very powerful with Labour party supporters and civil service bureaucrats…

See the comment by the UK’s version of the Onion

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/arts-%26-entertainment/guardian-readers-prepare-for-dan-brown-sneerathon-200909162065/

If you want a laugh, check out any articles by Polly Toynbee or Will Hutton (writing in the Observer, the Guardian’s Sunday sister paper). They’re hardcore social democratic Keynesians. Toynbee is obsessed with inequality and Hutton is obsessed with attacking the free market.

I was as turned off as anyone here by the comments section, of course, but it is my instinct to respond more charitably; most people have spent YEARS being subtly propagandized about the evils of capitalism. I know that I personally experienced Austrian economics as a revelation when I first began to study it. The use of the word “capitalism” for the system we have is constant, both in school and in the media.

Amazing this was in a mainstream newspaper. Imagine reading an op-ed like this one in the New York Times.

I love all the sophomoric comments underneath — these people are literally zombies rolled out of the public school assembly line.

If you read the comments far enough in Anthony Evans responds to some of the people and recommends White, Horwitz, Selgin, and Leeson.

Prefer the comments on here than those of that left-wing elitist rag.

Here (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6619963.ece) is another great piece from the Times in July making the case for removal of central banks. One notable libertarian you may be aware of is Dan Hannan (the guy who mocked our unelected, lame-duck prime mentalist with his youtube speech at the EU – http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/author/danielhannan/).

There are thus some Austrians in the UK. Indeed, one or two have even managed to infiltrate the Conservative Party and are parliamentary candidates standing at the general election. Such newspapers as this and the BBC – or AlJaBeeba as it is sometimes known – stifle debate, offering nothing more than government propaganda. I would also recommend Paul Staines’ Guide Fawkes blog (http://order-order.com/) which is libertarian in nature and provides updates about the idiocy of the political elite. He has claimed the scalp of former government minister Peter Hain and was instrumental in exposing the smeargate debacle of Damian McBride, which Gormless Clown knew nothing about. Of course.

We don’t have the support of the MSM and unfortunately we have the super-fast highway to serfdom with the undemocratic and unaccountable european union. This behemoth will make slaves of us all here if the Lisbon Treaty is ratified. So disparaging when you consider that men of ideology like Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and David Hume came from this nation.

The obstacles are thus many but articles like this and others, along with the blogs, ASI, IEA can hopefully begin to change the paradigm from one of failed welfare state and big, bureaucratic government to political and economic liberty. The current economic climate has split many in the country between left and right; keynesianites and Hayekians – let us hope Friedrich triumphs again.

@aje

You seem to have the token Marxist there named “questionnaire” who has made some pretty amazing claims.

He said that economists “tend to be ill-read, ill-informed and over-reliant on internal discourses and ludicrous abstract mathematical models.” And implied that Mises and Rothbard fit into this category. If there is one thing I hate, it is when Mises or Rothbard plop down a big mathematical formula for me to work through.

Then he hits us with what constitutes a “real” economist:

“The original ‘economists’ from Smith to Polanyi and Galbraith were political economists, in other words economists who knew enough about social, political, cultural and psychological contexts to talk sense.”

I think Austrians, and fellow travelers, are the only economists who include these factors. Remind me what the subtitle to Mises’ “Socialism” is? How often does Hayek use the phrase “the result of human action and not human design?” I guess the study of spontaneous order is really just the study of abstract mathematics.

Now, if only Hayek knew anything about psychology…

Not to mention the works of the others that they referred to as “delusional” i.e. Vernon Smith, Buchanan, North, and McCloskey. I mean, those four all exclusively use math, no study of society or institutions there.

The debate get highly technical at the end although I can’t follow their deeply technical argument. Might be worth checking out.

Perhaps the UK could base their currency on sterling silver. Now there’s a concept. Some more thoughts on silver…

http://marketdepth.typepad.com/marketdepth/2009/06/the-value-in-silver-1.html

Speaking of the Guardian, there is a great article here today…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/17/collapse-of-the-left

In it the hard-left columnist acknowledges what we her enemies have been saying for years. That liberal social policies and liberal economic policies cannot mix.