Everybody knows that if you favor hard money, or don't love MMT, you're a racist.
Um... no, actually not.
Phil is one of the most badass historians/intellectuals I know... I never wish to become a target of his, my god, what a tragedy that would be.
He's made a career of debunking famous/influential takes in the political economy sphere... most recently, Quinn Slobodian:
In Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, Mr. Slobodian has gone from insane to mental-institution worthy-candidate. I looked at this book, thought it was something I ought to read (but wouldn't enjoy), and prepared to order it...
Thank god I read Magness' take-down first. Uh-hu, what a waste of my time and cognitive functions reading it would be. (plenty of that going around #943891)
Slobodian is what's known as a grifter; an influential intellectual with a serious axe to grind and INSANE anti-freedom biases. Instead of doing scholarly work, advancing the knowledge of humankind, he makes shit up; invents connections that aren't there, and forces minds like Magness to spend time debunking it.
It's pretty sad to see, and the rest of us ought to be thankful people like Magness are around to check his nonsense. In this book, as far as I can tell, he's out for neoliberal blood — not to mention that "neoliberal" itself is a bullshit, nonsense term meaning exactly nothing (or, you know, everything that a strawmanning opponent needs for their target practice).
Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, has convinced himself that Trumpism traces its intellectual origins to the Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.
Uh, yea... right.
And from there, via eugenicists and IQ-peddlers to goldbugs and, you know, EVERYONE Slobodian doesn't like. Fucksake.
Hayek's Bastards is a book-length expansion of these arguments, characterizing today's populist right as the product of a "new fusionism" between the "three hards": genetically hardwired human nature (often predicated in racial determinism), the hard borders of immigration restrictionism, and hard money. While each of these elements certainly hovers around the far right today, Slobodian's attempts to situate the first two in the works of Hayek and Mises suffers from a lack of clear evidence for the parentage.
therein lies the major interpretive problem with this book: Its author is blind to any evidence that confounds his story. The resulting narrative arrives with a spectacular crash in the concluding chapter. Here, Slobodian tries to link Trump, the "national conservative" movement, alt-right figures such as Paul Gottfried and Curtis Yarvin, the tech-libertarian blogosphere, the COVID-era Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), the public backlash against left-wing Modern Monetary Theory arguments during the 2022 inflationary crisis, and above all Argentina's libertarian-leaning president Javier Milei. In his own words, "our genealogies of [neoliberal] ideas are X-rays that leave little doubt" to its malicious intentions.
Fair enough, Mises is difficult to read, and he often writes lengthy paragraphs where he sets up a position that he later attacks... in doing so, it might seem to a casual reader with the attention span of a five-year-old (#944961) that MISES IS RACIST.
Nah, nah, nah. Keep reading, Mr. Professor:
In the omitted portions of the passage, Mises condemns those failed attempts to link human capacity for understanding (or Verstehen in German) with ethnic and racial heredity. In place of Mises's actual context, Slobodian splices in a separate and later quote about Nazi race theory, thereby altering the passage's meaning to better fit his own thesis.
Anyway, it's a pleasure to see Mr. Magness stay on the beat.