> That's why I asked about something non-ideological, and neither Mises nor Hayek are that.

You may have mistaken Mises and Hayek, the fairly thoughtful and insightful market-favouring economists, with Mises and Hayek, the caricatures transmitted via a heavily mutating Murray Rothbard into US Arch-Libertarianism.

In particular Hayek is at great pains that he doesn't think the market is magical or morally superior. He clearly points out that markets assign by prices, not by commendable virtues.

But he does say that markets solve a problem that can't, beyond a certain scale, be safely solved in other ways without causing larger problems to emerge.

Hayek was a Nobel prize winning economist who along with Mises brought this whole issue to the attention of the field of economics. If you want more 'non ideological' than that in economics you're not gonna find it. By the definition you seem to be using a non ideological economist doesn't exist.

I don't see how winning a Nobel prize makes someone less ideological, especially if they're already widely known as particularly ideological.

For example, Soviet economist Kantorovich won the same prize the year following Hayek for work related to central planning, and I'd consider him a lot less ideological, not because of winning the prize, but because of his overall approach to issues: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/lau...

My point was that if you want a non ideological economist you're going to have a hard time finding one and that Hayek is as much an economist and no more 'ideological' than any other influential economist: from Hayek's contemporary Keynes through Samuelson, Friedman to Krugman they're all indisputably significant figures in economics and Hayek is no more ideological than the others. If you're going to dismiss Hayek as ideological you have to pretty much dismiss economics as a discipline entirely.

Winning a Nobel prize in itself doesn't automatically make a person non-ideological. As others have pointed out, Mises and Hayek have faced (justifiable) criticism for being too ideological, which you can't wave away by simply stating that they're Nobel laureates.

It's worth pointing out, for those of you who are playing the "oh it's libertarian so it must be bad" game, that other socialists also reached the same conclusions about central planning. Central planning is not an explicitly required feature of socialist economics, and critique of central planning is not exclusively the province of the right. Trotsky, Kropotkin, and the Mensheviks would be examples of prominent left wing thinkers who rejected central planning, especially the Soviet style.

You want "non-ideological" yet you also look for "counter-points to libertarian criticism."

I meant something that at least acknowledges the existence of arguments outside of Austrian school, let alone capitalist economics, and then analyzes merits of both/all.