- Etzelnik
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Re: The Imaginative Conservative
Scott wrote:
So basically Smith with insurance?
Yeah, that's not actually too far off. And during the so-called German "economic miracle" brought about by the post-WWII "social market economy," he personally advised West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer -- who, if memory serves, survived an assassination attempt masterminded by an (ahem) Etzelnik named Menachem Begin.
Ahahaha! :D
It's always interesting to see who gets my username.
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- Etzelnik
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Re: The Imaginative Conservative
Roepke even has a respect for the human scale and community that is rarely central to the Austrian school.
Would it be fair to attribute that to the horror of WWII?
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- Jeremy Taylor
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Re: The Imaginative Conservative
That could well have been a factor. But I think that Roepke had a different philosophical viewpoint and general sensibility in general, despite still being in the classical liberal tradition.
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Thread Starter- George
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Re: The Imaginative Conservative
Yeah, I meant libertarians in the sense of believing in a pretty much maximally limited government[.]
Roepke comes closest in that regard, I think. He's usually associated with the Austrian School of economics, but he allowed for some government intervention to ameliorate extremes of poverty and provide a social safety net, and he insisted that the "market" had to be embedded in a fairly conservative social order. His "ordoliberalism" is, for whatever it's worth, usually thought to be fairly closely aligned with Catholic social teaching. (He'd probably have gotten along with Meir Tamari as well.)
Believe it or not, even though he would deny the label of "conservative," F. A. Hayek might fit in this description as well even if to a lesser degree. He had an "interventionist" side to him, too. He was not against the welfare state per se.
Plus, he valued the role of tradition. Dr. Feser, incidentally, has written a bit on this in the Journal of Libertarian Studies:
***
Wilhelm Röpke was an interesting guy. However, I would like to suggest that either "extreme" claim about him is mistaken. There are those who want to make him more pro-market than he really was and those who want to make him a complete supporter of distributism.
A Humane Economy should be read alongside, e.g., Economics of the Free Society.
It should also be remembered that "Austrian" economics is about methodology, not policy recommendations. Röpke, much better than Mises, understood the role of culture and tradition. But I would suggest that Mises was by far the better economist, when taking into his contributions on things like the socialist calculation debate, etc.
(By the way, two contemporary economists who are "Austrian" and have good insights into cultural issues are Jörg Guido Hülsmann and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. For the former, look at his chapter on the cultural effects of inflation in The Ethics of Money Production. For the latter person, see his Democracy The God That Failed.)
Last edited by George (7/06/2015 9:29 pm)