Prompted by a discussion at SoloPassion, I went to the Ludwig von Mises Institute and took the quiz, "Are you an Austrian?"
Well.
I read a remark, a few years ago, that the place should call itself the Rothbard Institute, since they're pushing Rothbard more than Mises, and I do tend to agree. The quiz itself is a good example of that: I consider myself pretty consistently Austrianized, if not entirely an Austrian, so I wasn't shocked at my less than 100% score. But it wasn't my answers on unions or monopolies that kept me from scoring as a perfect Austrian; nor was it my responses about the Historical School, the gold standard, or praxeology that did me in. In fact, there were no questions on those last three items.
Nope. It was my answers about legitimate government functions. Apparently, there are none, and to think otherwise is un-Austrian -- which would have come as quite a surprise to Henry Hazlitt, who wrote a book, A New Constitution Now, in which he argued for a premier-parliamentary form of government in order to avoid another Watergate crisis, and to Ludwig von Mises himself, who served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry in time of war, and, I warrant, to Carl Menger, who served on a law faculty, tutored an archduke, and spent time on a commission which aimed to reform the monetary system of Austria-Hungary. Not an anarchist in the bunch.
The word "tendentious" comes to mind. And I read and enjoy a lot of the stuff at their site. The quiz itself is interesting, too, for the most part, and enjoyable. But I don't think I'm going too far in saying that it writes Menger, Mises, and Hazlitt out of the Austrian universe.
Or at least...they're no more "Austrian" than I am. I mean, I did score 96%. Heh.
(There's a ten-question version of the quiz. I scored 100% on that one. And if you like, there's a Spanish version as well.)
UPDATE: Score and punctuation added.
Posted by Craig Ceely at May 31, 2007 08:01 PM