John Tamny Needs to Stop Lecturing People on Mises’ Monetary Views

John Tamny has an unfortunate habit of criticizing Austrian economists by citing the legacy of Ludwig von Mises, when it is
clear that Tamny doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Let me be clear: I am all for people criticizing Austrians; perhaps we’re suffering from a blind spot on some key issue, and only an outsider can set us straight. But it will confuse the general public about what Mises’ views actually were, when guys like Tamny continually write articles ‘explaining’ Mises that are utterly wrong. One these pages, I’ve previously dealt with Tamny’s confused writings on banking – where he also argued that Mises would disavow current Austrian School economists – and in the present post, I’ll address his recent finger-wagging of David Gordon.
It all started when Gordon criticized the new book by Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames, arguing that they erroneously conceived of money as a ‘measuring rod’ of value. This is an absolutely standard component of Austrian economics, and it comes straight from the mouth of Mises – as I’ll document soon.
Yet astonishingly, John Tamny then rushed to the defense of Forbes and Ames by arguing that Gordon was defying the teachings of Mises. (!) Moreover, Tamny actually got sarcastic in his response, and argued that the Forbes/Ames/Tamny position was self-evident, a tautology flowing out of the definition of money as a means to facilitate exchange. Let me here just quote a bit of Tamny’s piece to reassure the reader that I’m not misrepresenting him:
Last week Mises Institute senior fellow David Gordon reviewed Money, the book released last summer by Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames… What struck this writer [Tamny–RPM] as odd is that in lightly attacking Forbes and Ames, Gordon only succeeded insofar as he perhaps unintentionally revealed a strong disagreement about money with the intellectual father of the Institute which employs him, Ludwig von Mises.
Gordon has a problem with the Forbes and Ames assertion that money is merely a measure meant to facilitate exchange. Notable here is that the authors are simply stating what’s obvious, something that surely predates even Adam Smith (‘the sole use of money is to circulate consumable goods’), that money isn’t wealth. It’s what we use to exchange actual wealth.

This post was published at Mises Canada on October 17th, 2014.