Robert Wenzel destroys him, of course. Weisenthal tweeted that all the proof you need that the Austrians are a “cult” is that they have invented “their own language.” His evidence? Austrians define inflation in terms of an increase in the money stock rather than as an increase in prices, the way the cool kids do. Wenzel shows what anyone with any knowledge of the history of economic thought would have known: the Austrian definition is the classical definition of inflation. The Austrians didn’t invent anything.

It’s fairly rich for Weisenthal, a Keynesian, to accuse the Austrians of inventing their own language. This from a guy whose school gave us a barrage of alien terminology (including the particularly unlovely term “wage goods”), or defined terms in numerous different ways, shifting from one meaning to the other without acknowledgment.

Oh, and there’s nothing cultish about this analysis by Paul Samuelson of Keynes’ General Theory:

It is a badly written book, poorly organized; any layman who, beguiled by the author’s previous reputation, bought the book was cheated of his five shillings. It is not well suited for classroom use. It is arrogant, bad-tempered. polemical, and not overly generous in its acknowledgments. It abounds in mares’ nests or confusions. In it the Keynesian system stands out indistinctly, as if the author were hardly aware of its existence or cognizant of its properties; and certainly he is at his worst when expounding its relations to its predecessors. Flashes of insight and intuition intersperse tedious algebra. An awkward definition suddenly gives way to an unforgettable cadenza. When finally mastered, its analysis is found to be obvious and at the same time new. In short, it is a work of genius.

Can you imagine what Joe Weisenthal would say if we praised as “a work of genius” a book by Murray Rothbard right after we called it arrogant, bad-tempered, polemical, and confused?