Link to the garbage essay for anyone that wants to read it:
The Twilight of Mammon
On the moral anthropology of the market order.
So the strangest thing about the essay is that it presents itself as a critique of the Austrian School, but never really engages Austrian Economics methodology. There is no engagement with praxeology, subjective value, economic calculation, time preference, interventionism, capital theory, or monetary theory. Predictably, the phrase “human action” does not appear once, which is not a small omission when dealing with a school of thought that explicitly grounds economics in purposeful human action under conditions of scarcity. Instead, the essay gives us a very flimsy and sweeping genealogy of neoliberalism, chicago monetarism, IMF, prediction markets, silicon Valley, Yarvin, Milei, Thatcher, Reagan, billionaire tech politics, and specifically "Bitcoin Maximalists", and then places all of it under the broad category of Austrian “market theology.” This makes for a half baked narrative and it does not amount to any semblance of a critique of Austrian methodology.
The largest conceptual problem is that the essay collapses Austrian econ into neoliberalism, and then collapses neoliberalism into the entire post-1971 fiat financial order. This is where the argument becomes deeply unstable. The Austrian tradition, especially the Mises-Rothbard-Hoppe line, has been one of the most radical critics of central banking, fiat money, credit expansion, inflationism, politically manipulated interest rates, and the high time preference modern economy driven by bailout after bailout. Yet the essay repeatedly treats the failures of this fiat order as if they are the natural fruits of Austrian economics itself. This is almost exactly backwards! An Austrian would look at financialization, housing speculation, stagnant wages, IMF debt traps, central bank interventions etc etc and would say that, yes, this is what happens when money is centralized and politicized and credit is severed from real savings and actual real production. I mean, sure, the essay is right to see something deeply corrupt in the current order, but it misidentifies the source of that corruption. The problem is not that markets have been allowed to function too freely (anyone who has experience in starting a business can tell you that this is not the case). The problem is that money, banking, and capital allocation have been captured by state-backed financial institutions and insulated from real market discipline.
This is also why the essay’s treatment of “the market” feels more theological than the Austrian position it is attacking. Austrian econ does not require anyone to worship “the Market” as some kind of oracle that reveals moral truth. The market is simply the emergent result of acting persons making exchanges according to their subjective valuations. Prices communicate information because they condense dispersed knowledge about scarcity, demand, opportunity cost, entrepreneurial judgment, etc. That is not a claim that the market replaces God or that market outcomes determine human worth. It is a claim about the limits of centralized knowledge and the impossibility of rational economic calculation without real prices.
And the author seems to mistake epistemic humility for idolatry. Hayek’s knowledge problem, whatever else one thinks of Hayek’s broader anthropology, is not saying the market is sacred. It is saying that no planner can possess the knowledge embedded in millions of individual choices. It is quite stupid to call this Mammon. That is just the basic reality of scarcity (though I guess this could offend certain modern intellectuals that have a fetish for wanting to organize society by a centralized committee)
Anyway, the essay also leans heavily on guilt by association. Yes, Sarrazin invokes time preference for his racist rhetoric or whatever, and Yarvin does quote Mises and Hoppe, and Milei claims he follows Rothbard (despite him being very pro fiat and a raging pro-war zionist), and Peter Thiel is "pro free markets", and therefore the Austrian School is treated as the common metaphysical root of every unpleasant political development on the right. But this is not an argument, and it is certainly not an argument against Austrian economics. It is a weak and selective political genealogy. Bad or controversial people can use true concepts badly. Time preference, for example, is not an ethnic ranking system. It is a universal category of action. Human beings prefer satisfaction sooner rather than later, all else equal, and different institutional arrangements and applications can raise or lower time preference across society. This is not a "far right" or a racist statement. Sure, time preference could be abused by someone trying to pathologize a population, but the abuse does not invalidate the concept.
In fact, from an Islamic or anti-fiat perspective, time preference is one of the most useful tools for understanding how riba, debt, inflation, and consumer credit systems degrade moral and economic life. If someone weaponizes the concept against Muslims, the answer is not to discard the concept. The answer is to use it properly.
And the Social Darwinism charge is another place where the essay relies more on structural resemblance than actual theoretical engagement. It says Social Darwinism believes nature selects winners, while Austrian economics believes markets select winners, and therefore Austrian economics is basically moral Darwinism. But market selection does not equate to biological selection or racial hierarchy. In Austrian econ, profit and loss are not cosmic judgments about which peoples deserve to exist. They are feedback mechanisms that reveal whether scarce resources are being used in ways that consumers actually value. A failed business does not mean the owner is spiritually inferior. It means he misjudged demand, costs, timing, or competition. I mean there might be places where early liberal and Austrian thinkers used civilizational language that could deserve criticism, maybe, but to move from that to the claim that Austrian economic theory itself is a colonial sorting machine is a very large leap. It attempts to refute a moral claim when no such claim was being made.
And lastly I keep coming back to the suspicious use of “Bitcoin maximalists” which is grouped together with market theology believers alongside New Right populists with hedge-fund and silicon Valley libertarians. It is interesting that the author specifically chose Bitcoin maximalists rather than those involved in crypto, because if there is any group in the broader digital asset world that has consistently criticized financial nihilism, insider games, VC extraction, fiat speculation, Cantillon effects, and the endless casino of tokenized nonsense, it is Bitcoin maximalists. Crypto is much easier to place inside the essay’s critique of Mammon where we do see endless tokens, artificial scarcity, insider allocations, yield schemes, fiat induced financialized hype cycles, and the conversion of everything into speculative instrument. Bitcoin maximalism, at its best, is a rejection of that entire logic! It is a critique of fiat money, not an intensification of it. So the lumping together is revealing.
The essay sees the disorder of the post-1971 financial world, but because it misreads Austrian economics and sound money thinking as the source of the disease, it ends up grouping some of the strongest critics of that system with the very forces they are criticizing. That is the basic problem running through the whole piece, is that it sees real pathologies, but keeps aiming at the wrong target.
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