We are all familiar with the fallacy of appealing to authority.  This occurs when someone claims that a conclusion is true because an expert says it is.  An example of an appeal to authority would be: minimum wage laws are bad for the economy because a bunch of articles on the Mises Institute website says it is.

Note that while the logic is bad, the conclusion is still true.  All of us who follow Austrian economics would agree that the Mises Institute is one of the best places to find information on why minimum wage laws are bad for the economy.  Although it is not good for the soundness of your argument to use the fallacy of appealing to authority, it is useful to appeal to authorities for the correctness of your argument.

I once heard someone say something like this: “I only care to read the philosophies of dead guys from a long time ago.”  That sounded odd and closeminded at first, but it actually packs a lot of useful information.  We should take the opinions and thoughts of long-dead individuals famous in their fields much more seriously than some random guy bloviating on the internet.  If someone has stood the test of time to remain notable, it’s a signal that their thoughts and ideas hold some value.  The guy running his mouth on Twitter could be correct, but his thoughts haven’t been vetted through years and years of countless people reading, considering, and critiquing his thoughts.

Take someone like Ludwig von Mises as an example.  His contributions to economics have largely not been rigorously negated by anyone in his field.  If you want to disagree with him, expect that you will need to provide mountains and mountains of evidence to prove that you are correct.  You’re not just disagreeing with him, you’re also disagreeing with a lot of other extremely smart people with expertise in his field who have analyzed his contributions with plenty of rigor.

If you can uniquely prove something from Mises to be incorrect, then you’re making a seriously significant contribution to economics.  With this in mind, let’s be careful about who we take seriously.  The desire to contribute something new is what drives a lot of people to be too quick to reject appealing to the works of authorities.  While we wouldn’t expect a Keynesian to care about what Mises says about a given economic topic, if someone who supports the Austrian school of economics casually dismisses a contribution by Mises, Rothbard, Hazlitt, etc., it should raise red flags.

So go ahead and read and appeal to the arguments of all of those old dead guys.  The fact that you’re aware of them should be a strong signal of their value!

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