Essays of Israel Kirzner

They have been collected in a new volume. It prompted my latest essay, but I would not call it a review. Kirzner addresses many difficult issues. For example, I write,

Those of us who wish to defend both methodological individualism and markets are faced with a paradox. When we say that the economy works well, we are claiming to speak for the entire society. But as individualists, we would say that there is no such moral entity as “society.”

2 thoughts on “Essays of Israel Kirzner

  1. My response to your paradox is that free markets are not imposed on “society,” but are the emergent results of the actions of countless individuals when they are left free to act as they choose.

    Also, a free market economist should not (strictly speaking) say that a free market economy works “well” for “society,” because that would imply that the economist claims to know what is “good” for society and what “society” is.

    The best we can say is that free markets work well for most individuals and that central planning works well for those in power and very poorly for everyone else.

  2. Kirzner says:
    ‘In such a context to talk of decisions made “by society” is, at best, to engage in metaphor.’

    I am a bit more subtle. Both consumer and producer have entrepreneurial competition. I differ on the semantics, what you call an entrepreneurial agent I call the pit boss, and it is not just because entrepreneurial is a pain to spell.

    The pit boss arrives as the entrepreneurials find themselves bottlenecked in the town square. Thus the market is not ‘society’, the market are specific points where bottlenecks occur among the entrepreneurials. The pit boss function is almost natural, banking is almost automatic. Look at the stock market pit, the boss function is fast, but not too complicated because the buyers and sellers tend to order themselves around the center.

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