In Theorizing on Capital, Hayek Uses the Wieserian Device of a COMMUNIST SOCIETY (!) Subject to an Omniscient Dictator

But the Mengerian tradition was developed in very different directions by his brilliant followers, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser, and by their own students and followers. Without tracing out this doctrinal development in any detail, suffice it to say that today the term “Austrian economics” is used to designate two very different paradigms. One derives from Wieser and may be termed the “Hayekian” paradigm, because it represents an elaboration and systematization of the views held by F. A. Hayek, a student of Wieser’s at the University of Vienna. Although it is yet to be generally recognized by Austrians, Wieser’s influence on Hayek was considerable and is especially revealed in the latter’s early work on imputation theory, which sought to vindicate the Wieserian (as against the Böhm-Bawerkian-Misesian) position that the imputation problem must be solved within the context of an exchangeless economy subject to the control of a single will yet somehow able to calculate using (subjective) value as the “arithmetic form of utility.”³

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³That there is no possibility of economic calculation and rational or purposeful allocation of resources within an economy based on division of labor where one will alone acts is, of course, the essence of Mises’s critique of socialism. Perceiving the unbridgeable gulf between his own and Wieser’s position on the possibility of directly imputing values to higher-order goods in the absence of monetary exchange, Mises, in his Notes and Recollections wrote that “[Wieser’s] imputation theory is untenable. His ideas on value calculation justify the conclusion that he could not be called a member of the Austrian School, but rather was a member of the Lausanne School.”

Also, Hayek, explicitly following Wieser, conceives the main problem of capital theory to be to explain how it is that the nonpermanent resources constituting the capital stock can yield a permanent net (physical) return. This Wieser-Hayek method of describing the quaesitum [something sought for, end or objective] of capital theory loads the dice in favor of explaining the interest return on capital in terms of productivity (rather than time-preference) considerations and, at the same time, diverts attention from what Böhm-Bawerk brilliantly perceived to be the fundamental question that must be satisfactorily answered by a correct theory of interest and was so answered by Mises’s pure time-preference theory: What is the cause of the difference in value between goods which differ only in their temporal availability? 

In theorizing on capital, moreover, Hayek makes significant use of the Wieserian device of a communist society subject to the control of an omniscient dictator, a device which reflects a paradigmatic lack of concern with problems of monetary appraisement and calculation. 

—Joseph T. Salerno, “Mises and Hayek Dehomogenized,” Review of Austrian Economics 6, no. 2 (1993): 114, 114n.