The Chronicles website republishes an older piece by Dr. Fleming on Walter Block and the Austrians school

He cautions:

Most American conservatives (and many self-described libertarians) would say something like this: “I agree with the libertarian analysis of money and banking and economic liberty, but on social, cultural, and moral questions, I defend ‘traditional moral values.’” This was, more or less, what was meant by “fusionism” in those distant ages so long ago when there was a conservative movement whose chief “theoretician” was Frank Meyer at National Review. Quite apart from the obvious problem that fusionism simply did not work (there are scarcely any fusionists under 60 years old), it is—or rather was—based on a false distinction. As Walter Block and other true liberals are fully aware, libertarian economics is only an application of libertarian social and moral theory. Mises makes the point emphatically in the introduction to Human Action, a work which is widely regarded as the libertarian “bible.” Economics, says Mises, is the application to markets of “praxeology,” a science of human behavior, based on the subjective theory of value “which converted the theory of market prices into a general theory of human choice.”

If the general theory is false and evil, the economic version of it must be—however much we might want to believe otherwise—equally false and equally evil. Suppose we reached that conclusion—what then? Would we all become socialists or national mercantilists or Green agrarians? That is, apparently, what libertarians want us to believe: Either sign on to their ideology or be declared an enemy of human freedom. Such a fate, however, is reserved only for people who cling to the slender reed of classical liberalism as the sole support of a free society. People loved liberty, even economic liberty, long before Adam Smith (much less Ludwig von Mises) ever propounded his fallacies. Our search is for truth, not for a comforting ideology, and the things we love that are real and true—our wives and children, the freedom to buy, sell, and compete in the marketplace—cannot be defended with illusions.

I still think there may be something to the Austrian analysis of monetary policy and the banking system; even if there isn't, might Dr. Fleming not be going to far in saying that since the general theory of liberalism is false, then the economic version is as well? In so far as they share the same false premises, then the conclusions are false. But what if the analysis by Austrians of the current political economy (the loss of manufacturing and its replacement by finance, etc.) is based more on observation and draws upon premises other than the central tenants of liberalism? It may not go as far as an analysis that looks at the different levels at play (for example, that of E. F. Schumacher and John Michael Greer), but it is useful in reminding us what "real wealth" is? ( = products that satisfy our needs, and not fictional wealth that is due to speculation)

Of Hans-Hermann Hoppe Dr. Fleming writes:

Hoppe is the true exception that proves the rule: He is too intelligent to be a Misesian libertarian, and he really is not. He is a liberal monarchist very much in the vein of my late friend Erik v. Kuhneldt-Leddihn. This piece comes from eight years ago, when I was still annoyed with HHH for his unfair attack on Sam Francis. I should not have let this irritation temporarily overcome my admiration for Hoppe’s often brilliant analysis.