Cournot seminar – Scott Scheall (Austin University)

Event details :

We are pleased to welcome to the next session of the BETA Cournot seminar organised with the support of the FSEG on Tuesday 19/05 at 2:00pm:

Scott Scheall (Austin University)

who will present his paper entitled

Liberalism’s Ouroboros: DOGE and the Liberal Transition Problem in Stark Relief

Abstract: In my F. A. Hayek and the Epistemology of Politics: The Curious Task of Economics (2020), I argue that Ludwig von Mises’s famous socialist calculation argument and F. A. Hayek’s various extensions of that argument all share the same general logical form. To wit,

1. To deliberately realize goal G, policymakers must possess knowledge K.
2. Policymakers lack knowledge K.
3. Therefore, policymakers cannot deliberately realize goal G.
4. Corollary: If goal G is to be realized despite policymakers’ lack of knowledge K, spontaneous forces must compensate for this lack of knowledge.In the third chapter of the book, I argue that Austrian economists (indeed, more generally, all classical liberals and libertarians who support small, if not minimal, government) have not established that policymakers possess the knowledge required to deliberately liberalize a relatively illiberal society. Defenses of liberalism, in general, and of liberalization policies, in particular, often assume that policymakers possess such knowledge as a matter of course. I argue, however, that there are many reasons to think and, moreover, much evidence that suggests, policymakers do not typically possess this knowledge. Complicating matters further, there is no argument, to my knowledge, that, when policymakers lack some of the knowledge required to deliberately liberalize, a more liberal society is likely to spontaneously emerge from comparatively illiberal circumstances. Those sympathetic to liberalization policies thus confront a knowledge problem, the knowledge problem of liberal transitions.

In the present paper, I develop this argument further and consider the (mis)adventures of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) through its lens. The few successes and more numerous failures of DOGE illustrate the knowledge problem of liberal transitions in stark relief.