Rebels of the Week: Wordslingin’ Emcees “Hayek” and “Keynes”

Osama bin Laden’s assassination by the American state and the British Royal Wedding may have tried to obscure the release of , but any potential Silver Underground Rebel of the Week will definitely be playing second fiddle to anyone who raps as well about economics as the crew of John Papola and Russ Roberts at EconStories.tv.

Besides the hip hop battle between interventionist John Maynard Keynes and free marketeer F.A. Hayek being massively entertaining, instructive and as of now having over half a million views on YouTube, there are moments that still, after repeated viewings, send shivers down my spine.

“Creating employment’s a straightforward craft when the nation’s at war and there’s a draft.  If every worker was staffed in the army and fleet we’d have full employment and nothing to eat.”

Frederic Bastiat’s What is Seen and Not Seen is such a great basic economics lesson for people to learn in this video.  Employment isn’t the end of economics; prosperity is! The goal of employment is to create prosperity, not the other way around.
“The economy’s not a car there’s no engine to stall, no mechanic can fix it there’s no ‘it’ at all.  The economy is us; we don’t need a mechanic. Put away the wrenches; the economy’s organic!”

This one is even better. “The economy” is an abstraction of the aggregate of all productive human exchange.  To think about the economy in this way assumes that one can remove oneself from one’s interior vantage point within the economy and have a value-free vision of a macroeconomic landscape.  The farther away you get from your individual local knowledge the more difficulty one will have in knowing the preferences and dreams of the local actors, making too much economic abstraction methodologically dubious.

“I don’t want to do nothing; there’s plenty to do.  The question I ponder is, “who plans for whom?” Do I plan for myself or leave it to you? I want plans by the many not plans by the few!”

Who Plans for Whom? is a very famous chapter in Hayek’s 1944 The Road to Serfdom, if I remember correctly.  When people say the phrase “a planned economy” they’re omitting the (praxeological) truth that all economic activity is planned.  People act because they have a goal in mind that they want to achieve and thus make their own plans to achieve it.  As I said above, the farther one is removed from the local decision making process the harder it is to act successfully, as one lacks the knowledge necessary to do so!

“We need stable rules and real market prices so prosperity emerges and cuts short the crisis.  Give us a chance so we can discover the most valuable ways to serve one another.”

Libertarianism isn’t atomistic or isolationist.  It isn’t “leave me alone” so much as “let’s cooperate on mutually agreeable terms.” Prices send signals about how we can best help one another, and once privilege is removed from the marketplace and cost is truly internalized real prices will help coordinate those of us who interact with people above Dunbar’s number. Let’s help each other make our world freer and more prosperous.

Just remember, rebels, the economy isn’t a class you can master in college. To think otherwise is the pretense of knowledge.  Libertarianism is about humility and realizing how little we actually know about redesigning society.  We need to empower local actors not direct them from the commanding heights.  For illustrating this so delightfully, Russ Roberts, John Papola and EconStories.tv at large are our Silver Underground Rebels of the Week.  We can’t wait for part three of the Hayek/Keynes showdown or your other forthcoming videos! Your efforts are successfully educating a new generation who have serious doubts about the precarious economic paths the nations of the world now walk.  A stylish and informative video directed at youth often does this task better than a white paper trying to reach existing intellectuals and policymakers who have more to lose by changing their mind this late in their careers.  Well done!

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