Ok, I have this re-occurring thought and I wanted to throw it out there for discussion...
Tom Woods made a comment in his recent speach that we all can contribute to the cause in our own way; whether that is contributing money, writings, research, etc.
I've had this thought over and over again that I don't want to recreate the wheel or just restate the works others have done in my own words.
Tom Woods, Bob Murphy, Lew Rockwell are machines. But in the end they are one guy. Having another career, I hope to make a difference within my chosen field, but also have interests that are Austrian similar but different, that I'd really like to add to the cause.
Is there a way for that handful of us to contribute? In a way more than reading Rothbard, etc, and adding our own spin?
I tend to think myself in the areas of Doug French due to my profession. I don't want to be a Doug French, but are there areas of economic understand that the hundreds of "me's" out there can do some work and further the work of others, or assist ?
I suppose it may even have been Walter Block's recent speach asking for suggestions on his topic that caused me to write this... I'd completely be interested in adding what I could to the cause, but given my time and area is so miniscule, could it contribute, and if so could the request for that contribution be centralized somewhere so that it could do some good? We've got an army of interested people that may only themselves be able to reiterate the works of others in their own way, which I think is still a worthy cause in some way, but their own gifts may be better put to work in other ways.
use the state's resources to fuel your independence.
"The best way to bail out the economy is with liberty, not with federal reserve notes." - pairunoyd
"The vision of the Austrian must be greater than the blindness of the sheeple." - pairunoyd
This can and is being done. For example, combine a stock broker with media personality with Austrian school advocate and you get Peter Schiff. I combine commercial real estate analysis with Austrian school ideas in my career. I'm sure that there are many other examples.
The only way society will change towards a more an-cap/libertarian one is through education.
To paraphrase Marc Faber: We're all doomed, but that doesn't mean that we can't make money in the process. Rabbi Lapin: "Let's make bricks!" Stephan Kinsella: "Say you and I both want to make a German chocolate cake."
Agree with the above two posts... a little more of where I'm coming from.
If I'm an Austiran, and I spend my time reading that material. I want to contribute to a certain area, say Bubble Economics. I'm not full-tme LVM staff... what can I do to increase my education and further information.
I simply think there are thousands of individuals "out here", on the web, that have a little extra time to assist in the progression of knowledge from individuals that can lead that research, say a few dozen people researching the history and consequences of ROAD SOCIALISM in thier own state / county / city, for a Walter Block that would lead to a pile of information that blasts conventional wisdom out of the park.
I get that there is a Walter Block that is a specialist. But humor me for a moment that there are 1000 local specialists that this website or some other locality can leverage. Again, local Austrian here looking to further their own cause and the whole cause.
And the recent Block youtube is why I posted. I don't see the point in researching and posting what has been done in the past and think with internet tools the level we can stand on others shoulders is significantly higher.
I myself see a lot of correspondances between John Boyd's military science theories regarding decision making(the OODA loop model, which is all about human action after all) and the Austrian epistemology in general. I think that the two can really benefit from being combined, and to the best of my knowledge not a whole lot of people are covering that ground.
Boyd's model could go a long way towards explaining exactly why independent entrepreneurs are both so vital to the economy and why "too big to fail" is entirely backwards - when you get big enough, you are destined to fail.
Boyd fought centralization of decision-making and top-down control in the military all his life, much like Mises et. al did in matters economic.
This is stuff I think merits much more research, and I intent to contribute to it.
pairunoyd:use the state's resources to fuel your independence.
No
The difference between libertarianism and socialism is that libertarians will tolerate the existence of a socialist community, but socialists can't tolerate a libertarian community.