A large percentage of the people running our institutions are actually at war with reality...
That’s what my old friend Christian Nix said to me last week. I had the privilege of chatting with him on his Expat Phyles podcast… and it was a wide-ranging conversation. I’ll share it with you once the podcast is edited and published.
I met Christian – Tain, as his friends call him – five or six years ago within what used to be called the Agora network. Agora is the ancient Greek word for “gathering place” or “marketplace”.
I don’t believe that name is used to refer to the network much today, but the Agora still exists. It’s the largest financial publishing network on the planet. Except it’s decentralized.
The Agora consists of independent investment research franchises. They all share the same human resources (HR) and information technology (IT) infrastructure. But each franchise operates completely independently. The analysts are free to wander down any rabbit hole they so choose… as long as they put their best investment ideas and macro analysis out there for the benefit of subscribers.
I’ve been immersed in the Agora for over ten years now. First as a customer and then as an analyst working in the industry.
I’ll share with you the story of how I linked up with the Agora tomorrow. It’s all about the people. I’ve gotten to know more than a few extremely high-caliber people within this network. Tain being one of them.
And there was always a strong Austro-libertarian undertone to the network. I believe that dynamic has faded in recent years. But in the network’s prime, most of us had read all the major works from the great Austrian economists.
We could talk about Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard all day. We could refer to Frédéric Bastiat, Jean-Baptiste Say, and the Cantillon effect… and everyone knew what we were talking about. Most of this would sound like a foreign language to anyone outside the network.
Analysts also engaged each other in good-spirited debate. That kept us sharp.
On my very first day in the office a colleague I had just met debated me on the merits of Bitcoin. That was before Bitcoin had ever eclipsed the $1,000 price point… so very few people were paying attention to it.
I’ve also been on email chains where multiple analysts were debating monetary theory. Those discussions centered around how the monetary system actually works. It gets quite arcane when you start to peel back the layers.
That said, when one begins to understand money and economics from the Austrian school’s perspective, one naturally comes to see how economics and moral philosophy go hand in hand. This is something Tain and I talked about a bit last week.
Moral philosophy concerns itself with the nature of moral judgments. That is to say, how can we tell what is right from what is wrong?
Jesus of Nazareth made a great suggestion. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, he said.
Today we call this the Golden Rule. It’s a simple thing. But if we think about it, it’s absolutely brilliant.
What Jesus was really suggesting is that we rely on self-reference to determine right from wrong. To do this, we have to imagine what it would be like if we were on the receiving end of a given action. Would we like it? Or would it cause us harm and distress?
That which causes harm and distress to our fellow humans is wrong. That which benefits our fellow humans is right. And that which does neither is neutral.
It’s a simple thing. But moral philosophy also applies directly to economic policy. If we approach it from this lens, we can very quickly determine the morality of any proposed policy.
If a given policy causes harm or distress to anyone, it is morally wrong. Even if that same policy causes benefit to a particular group.
And that speaks to the importance of analyzing a policy’s impact for everybody across the entire economy. This is the subject of Henry Hazlitt’s great Economics in One Lesson. Here’s Hazlitt:
The art of economics consists of looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy. It consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.
That’s key. Too often those promoting a given policy talk only about how it will benefit one specific group of people. But what about everybody else? That’s a question we always need to answer.
In other words, economics and moral philosophy go hand-in-hand. As Tain and I discussed on his Expat Phyles podcast last week, you can’t separate the two.
I’ll leave it there for today. Tomorrow I’ll share with you how I came to meet the heroes of capitalism.
-Joe Withrow
P.S. I know the talk about dead economists isn’t for everybody. But as John Maynard Keynes once wrote, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
The point is, ideas run the world. So if any of this catches your fancy, I would highly recommend Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom.
Tom’s program provides a world-class education on both economics and history, and it does so in a compelling and entertaining way. I’m speaking from experience here.
If you would like to review Liberty Classroom’s course listings, just go right here: