“A clash of the titans thus becomes a dialogue of the deaf.”

For those who are interested in economics and politics, I discovered an online resource that might be worth perusing: a debate between Bastiat (a classical free-market supporter) and Proudhon (an anarcho-socialist), both of whom have been mentioned on this blog, at least in the comments, in the past. The debate was on the subject of interest.

A helpful commentary is given on why the debate seemed to stalemate between these two:

In the light of these sorts of complications, I just don’t know what is meant by reducing prices to “cost”; hence I continue to prefer the Austrian subjective-utility approach over cost-of-production theories, even when the latter come in sophisticated forms like Carson’s. And at least part of what keeps tripping both Bastiat and Proudhon up in the course of their debate, I think, is that each party’s theory contains subjectivist and anti-subjectivist elements muddled together. Indeed, it seems to me that the two fundamental confusions that dog both Bastiat and Proudhon throughout their debate are, first, inconsistency over value subjectivism (both parties treat it alternately as true and as false), and second, inconsistency over the extent to which prevailing economic conditions approximate those of a free market (both treat them alternately as a close approximation and as no approximation at all). A clash of the titans thus becomes a dialogue of the deaf.