by Benjamin Marks, Economics.org.au editor-in-chief

Review of Professor Sinclair Davidson’s two Catallaxy Files posts: (1) “Steve Kates, Classical economics and the Austrian school,” January 4, 2012; and (2) “The Adam Smith smear,” January 5, 2012.

Professor Sinclair Davidson, in the second post, when writing Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s name, approvingly hyperlinks to Dr Oliver Marc Hartwich on Hoppe despite Hartwich’s cheap rhetorical tricks having already been exposed, and the content of Hartwich’s criticism refuted, in, among many other places, this Hartwich interview.

Then, rather than engaging with Hoppe’s criticism of Davidson’s (and Kates’) statism, Davidson chooses, in both posts one and two, to go after one line Hoppe made about Adam Smith. Davidson is wrong here too, but at least he is responding to something by Hoppe.

Davidson emphasises and selects Schumpeter passages tendentiously to accuse Rothbard and Hoppe of misquoting, misinterpreting, or not reading, Schumpeter on Smith. To respond decisively and briefly, I will simply quote this relevant passage (from the same Schumpeter book Davidson quotes from), where Schumpeter himself speculates why people wrongly hold Smith in so much higher regard than Schumpeter himself does:

Though he [Alfred Marshall] was far from attributing to Smith any original ideas, he nevertheless arrives at an estimate of the performance that seems much higher than ours. One reason for this may be that he was speaking of a brother — for as has been and will be emphasized, there are many similarities in the performances and in the historical positions of the two. Another may be that he was speaking of a countryman — for Marshall was very insular. A third one may be that he was speaking of a fellow liberal — for Marshall, too, was a strong free trader. But whatever the reason, the readers should observe that, so far as Marshall’s very brief comments enable us to judge, there is no difference as to the facts of the case except this: Smith may certainly be said, in a sense, to have “developed” existing doctrines of value and price; but whereas Marshall approved unconditionally of the manner of this “development,” I have some fault to find with it … The blame is at [Smith’s] door for much that is unsatisfactory in the economic theory of the subsequent hundred years, and for many controversies that would have been unneccessary had he summed up in a different manner. [Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (Taylor & Francis, 2006), p. 293.]

I wonder which of these motives — brotherly collegiality, parochialism, etcetera — explain why Davidson would wrongly call Rothbard on Smith a “hatchet job”?

Davidson also says, in his second post, that Rothbard and Hoppe are ignorant of Ludwig von Mises on Smith. The consistent Davidson is wrong again. Here’s some Misesian criticism of Smith (from the same article by Mises that Davidson selectively quotes from):

Nobody should believe that he will find in Smith’s Wealth of Nations information about present-day economics or about present-day problems of economic policy. Reading Smith is no more a substitute for studying economics than reading Euclid is a substitute for the study of mathematics. It is at best an historical introduction into the study of modern ideas and policies. Neither will the reader find in the Wealth of Nations a refutation of the teachings of Marx, Veblen, Keynes, and their followers. It is one of the tricks of the socialists to make people believe that there are no other writings recommending economic freedom than those of 18th-century authors and that in their, of course unsuccessful, attempts to refute Smith they have done all that is needed to prove the correctness of their own point of view. Socialist professors — not only in the countries behind the Iron Curtain — withheld from their students any knowledge about the existence of contemporary economists who deal with the problems concerned in an unbiased scientific way and who have devastatingly exploded the spurious schemes of all brands of socialism and interventionism. If they are blamed for their partiality, they protest their innocence. “Did we not read in class some chapters of Adam Smith?” they retort.

In conclusion, neither Mises nor Schumpeter are as supportive of Smith as Davidson would have us believe, and the same words of criticism that Davidson applies to Rothbard and Hoppe better apply to Davidson himself.

Having cleared up that distraction, it would be good if Dr Steven Kates and his supporters would please respond to this clear criticism of Kates’ negative comments on the Mises Seminar.