MY PURPOSE IN REFORMING AUSTRIAN ECON: SCIENCE (from elsewhere) Peter, Thanks fo

MY PURPOSE IN REFORMING AUSTRIAN ECON: SCIENCE

(from elsewhere)

Peter,

Thanks for the response. Sorry this is long, but it takes what it takes.

—“Read one way….read another way”—

Well of course. But then, that is the difference between analytic (empirical criticism) and continental (rational justification). Or more precisely, that’s the difference between science and philosophy.

But it is not just a binary choice. I can read it a third way: that Mises was a member of the cosmopolitan enlightenment and subject to the category errors of that movement. Just as anglos, french and germans were subject to the errors of their enlightenments: the attempt to universalize local competitive group strategies into general moral rules. That is the goal of each of the enlightenment movements: Anglo island, French imperial, German Territorial, and Jewish diasporic strategies expressed as rational rather than mythological arguments.

I think it’ might help to understand the purpose for my criticism:

(1) It’s necessary to the defeat of the broader problem of cosmopolitan pseudoscience, anglo neo-puritanism, postmodern propagandism, and less so, german idealism – in all disciplines.

(2) It’s necessary to undermine the libertarian problem-children: Rothbardians, who promote psudosicence, objective immorality, pseudorationalism, and justificationism. (People who I am very proud to have done substantial damage to over the past year – and will continue to.)

3) It’s necessary to restate western liberty in scientific rather than rational terms in order to save the rule of law, and with it, liberty.

So if I am hard on Mises, it’s because of these three reasons. I have to be. Because without institutionaliing a means of ending deceit, where loading, framing, overloading via propaganda and pseudoscience are principle tools of coercion, there is no possible means of reconstructing liberty.

I am such an admirer of yours because you are a good and moral man; a great communicator; arguably one of the great teachers in the field; but your incentives as such are sympathetic and explicative, not corrective. Mine are corrective and revolutionary: the problem of pseudoscience (which has a very precise meaning) in economics, which Romer has tried to bring to the forefront, is central to the perceived Heterodoxy of Austrian economics (or more correctly “Moral Economics”).

Mises was right in this regard: if any economic statement cannot be constructed through subjectively testable operations (human judgements in response to available information) then no proof has been demonstrated. A proof is not confirmation, it is merely a criticism. A means of falsification. If a statement survives a proof, then it is at least existentially possible.

If it took very smart people in mathematics to create the foundations of mathematics, it will take very smart people in economics to create the foundations of economics – because the well is poisoned. Mises was very close, but for cultural reasons endemic to his era, he failed.

This is a very complex problem, or someone else would have solved it by now. I am just lucky to live in the internet era, and have had the luxury of studying all of the disciplines, and stumbling upon Mises by accident via Hoppe’s inverted but still brilliant application of economic language to moral argument. All his other errors aside, his pedantic rigor was the first application of operational analysis using property and voluntary exchange to all of social science.

The operational revolution failed: Minsky in Computer Science, Mises in economics, Bridgman in physics, Brouwer in Math, Popper in Philosophy.

Einstein demonstrated the problem (frame) and instigated both Brouwer and Bridgman: no premises are certain. None.

Economics can be the study of objective morality or of objective immorality. At present, the fallacy of majority rule provides incentive to justify objectively immoral economics, and to sideline as heterodox moral economics.

So saving the west, saving rule of law, saving economics, saving philosophy, saving western truth, and correcting the century of pseudoscience, are all identical problems: completing the minimum set of warranties of due diligence necessary to testify that one has eliminated imaginary content, error, bias, and deceit.

Austrian economics and conservative social mores are empirical: when the evidence forces change in behavior, then norms and law should reflect it – not before. This is an empirical and anti-hubristic philosophy. But Austrian econ and Conservative social philosophy are not yet scientific: meaning not yet truthfully stated and warrantied.

That is what I am trying to accomplish (and think I have.)

Cheers

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine