Recently I ran across this thread...Who Are Your Top 5 Austrian Economists...and noticed that there are way too many economists mentioned in that thread whose work I am not familiar with.
Currently I'm trying to figure out how to properly address people's failure to understand why perspectives should matter. Your perspective represents your ideas, interests, values, desires, wants, needs, priorities, concerns, fears, hopes, dreams, goals, experiences, preferences, and partial knowledge.
On this page I've complied a ton of evidence that proves that people do not understand the value of perspectives...Unglamorous but Important Things. And here's my attempt to try and explain the economic value of perspectives...Perspectives Matter - Economics in One Lesson.
What difference does your perspective have on the economy? Why does it matter that you should have the freedom to choose how you use your limited resources? What's the impact of limiting choices? For example, what if Ron Paul hadn't been allowed to choose to become a politician? People would have "seen" that he was a doctor and said, "oh, it's a good thing that he is a doctor. He is adding value to our society. Therefore, our system works." What wouldn't they have seen? The "unseen" would have been the greater value that Ron Paul would have added to our society by being a politician.
So...in order to kill a few birds with one stone...can you offer any quotes from any economists that address the idea that perspectives should matter? Here's kind of what I'm looking for...
We don't want governmental foresight destroying individual foresight. Individual foresight can be thought of as our unique perspectives.If the socialists mean that under extraordinary circumstances, for urgent cases, the state should set aside some resources to assist certain unfortunate people, to help them adjust to changing conditions, we will, of course, agree. This is done now; we desire that it be done better. There is, however, a point on this road that must not be passed; it is the point where governmental foresight would step in to replace individual foresight and thus destroy it. It is quite evident that organized charity would, in this case, do much more permanent harm than temporary good. - Bastiat, Justice and Fraternity
Nobody knows your perspective better than you do.There is no need to prove that each individual is the only competent judge of this most advantageous use of his lands and of his labor. He alone has the particular knowledge without which the most enlightened man could only argue blindly. He alone has an experience which is all the more reliable since it is limited to a single object. He learns by repeated trials, by his successes, by his losses, and he acquires a feeling for it which is much more ingenious than the theoretical knowledge of the indifferent observer because it is stimulated by want. - Turgot, The Turgot Collection
The needs, interests and knowledge of mankind all fall under the umbrella of our combined perspectives. Each perspective we integrate...the greater the value of the outcome. Each perspective we suppress...the lower the value of the outcome. In other words...to suppress perspectives is to waste our most valuable resource. To integrate perspectives is to maximize the benefit of our most valuable resource.Thus our policy should surrender itself to the course of nature, and the course of commerce, which is no less necessary and no less irresistible than the course of nature, without seeking to direct this course. For, in order to guide it without disturbing it, and without injuring ourselves, it would be necessary for us to be able to follow all the changes in the needs, the interests, and the industry of mankind. It would be necessary to know these in such detail as would be physically impossible to obtain, and in which even the most skillful, the most active and the most painstaking government will risk always to be wrong in half the cases, as is observed or acknowledged by Abbé Galiani in a work in which he nevertheless vindicates with the greatest zeal the system of prohibitions just on the type of trade where they are most disastrous, to wit, the grain trade. I add that, even if we had for all these particulars the mass of knowledge which is impossible to gather, the result would only be to let things go precisely as they would have gone by themselves, by the simple action of the self-interest of man, enlivened and held in check by a free competition. - Turgot, The Turgot Collection
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