antoine-roquentin:

Carl Menger: “I must defend my friend the Austrian prince, and indeed all monarchy, from the whims of the socialists who want to overthrow the market. But how do I defend the power of a given individual with capital to overrule the wishes of others without it? Perhaps if I center the individual as the primary economic actor within my schema, despite the lack of relevance this has in the real world…”

Eugen Bohm-Bawerk, Menger’s “disciple”: “There is no exploitation under Capitalism, because the individual gains from having revenue given to him in advance of the sale of a commodity. In fact, it’s the individual’s choice that drives everything under Capitalism, especially the price of goods, not the amount of labour they use working on a product.”

Ludwig von Mises, Bohm-Bawerk’s student: “The information sent by the individual through choosing whether or not to buy something at an individual choice is indeed the only reliable way of distributing goods, and is the foundation of Western civilization. Anything that interferes with price signals will always be destructive.”

Friedrich Hayek, von Mises’ student: “Individuals are information processors, able to collate and rationally use pricing data to their advantage. They are always maximizing their utility, and that’s why Capitalism is the most efficient economic system: it is always utilizing everything the very best way an economy can. The only reason why the real world doesn’t correspond to this is because people are unable to maintain the complete control over their decision-making thanks to state-regulation.”

Murray Rothbard, founder of the Mises Institute: “Obviously, though, some people maximize their utility better than others, as we can see in the real world. This is likely a result of inherent biological factors, which are probably correlated with race.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Rothbard’s protege: “In fact, if we want to see utility maximization in a society, we need a way of making people’s control over their property absolute. Democracy can only limit the power of the rational mind to maximize utility. This even means giving people the ability to entirely enslave themselves to others in a free market of monarchs, to truly extend the workings of Capitalism to their fullest.”

Mencius Moldbug, aka Curtis Yarvin, a big fan of Hoppe: “Of course, on the other hand, some people obviously make better monarchs/utility maximizers than others, and we can see this by looking at who is currently successful in society. It’s the people who are heads of large companies, the CEOs, who should be made the new monarchs of our countries, because we have made the mistake of overthrowing the old ones. As such,”

Peter Thiel, billionaire and friend/admirer of Yarvin: