Hardly. It was _their_ idea! The Social Democratic party was pretty much the definition of “political elite” in Sweden in those days.

I’m not subjecting Rothbard to the same level of criticism as Roberts because Rothbard is DEAD. My question is not whether the guy is an acolyte of Rothbard, my question was if the guy believes in free markets. Rothbard could be a pinko commie as far as my questions are concerned. My questions have nothing to do with Rothbard at all. Why should I go after Rothbard when the whole purpose of my questioning is to go after Roberts?

you asked Russ Roberts what he believes. That’s not a question about praxeology.

My point about Rothbard wasn’t that Rothbard was wrong as such. Indeed, everyone can be wrong. My point was that Rothbard turned to a statist in a particular case, because he believed that certain goals cannot be achieved without coercion. Why are you not subjecting Rothbard to the same level of criticism as Roberts?

I believe that you can only evaluate individual arguments, not a person as such. Heck, even Krugman wrote some reasonable economic papers in the 80s. Russ Roberts, for example, coauthored the two Hayek vs. Keynes rap videos, and on one Econtalk he spoke with Gavin Andresen about Bitcoin, last year in April (and it was quite positive), before the big media attention.

Also, I don’t think I’m mixing ethics and economics at all. Read what I wrote again, and point out where I’m making a moral judgement, rather than asking him for an economic position.

I don’t think my questions were unreasonable in the slightest. If they guy believes in free markets, then he shouldn’t have any problem answering those two questions.

with all due respect, you mixed economics and ethics.

Also, with Rothbard there’s the issue with fiduciary media. Credit expansion causes the business cycle, but he was unable to provide a free market method of preventing credit expansion. He argued they should be banned because they violate property rights (which is false). Only after we have Bitcoin did a free market method emerge. Rothbard couldn’t have foreseen Bitcoin, but at least he should have figured out that credit expansion is a consequence of transaction costs, not of fraud. Paradoxically, almost all economists, including Austrians (even Selgin and White) realise that transaction costs influence the choice between specie and money substitutes. But none of them made the obvious conclusion that a medium of exchange with sufficiently low transaction costs would lead to absence of money substitutes and therefore absence of credit expansion.

The gold standard proponents, in particular Rothbard, made a lot of effort on explaining how a legal reform towards gold standard should proceed. This is absurd, an anarchist arguing for a statist legal reform. In this particular topic, Rothbard was the statist and Hayek the anarchist.

“There was a really serious threat to the ownership structure in Sweden during the 1970s, in effect, there was a proposal to buy out ownership entirely and turn it into a sort of worker-owned democracy. The political elites in Sweden were horrified by this and fought a tremendous battled against it. The way they fought was partly, again, through ideological mechanisms. The bankers controlled the Nobel Prize in economics, that went to Hayek, went to Friedman, that went to all the neoliberal figures to try to give legitimacy to all the neoliberal arguments.”
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2006/lilley190606.html
Don’t take any wooden nickels, Mike.