Author: Curt Doolittle

HOPPE IS WRONG ON POPPER – AND THIS IS WHY.

I suspect that at this point Popper would suggest that all our attempts at social engineering have failed. And that we should constrain our ambitions to improving the institutions that facilitate economic calculation.

While Hans attacks Popper for his piecemeal social engineering, the fact of the matter is, that Popper’s philosophical work is the closest to that of Propertarianism yet stated in the Germanic languages.

I don’t criticize Hans for his imperfections: (a) that private property rights are logically sufficient for the suppression of demand for the state, and (b) that argumentation is not causal, (c) that praxeological statements are a-prioristically deductive, rather than sympathetically testable. Instead, I focus on what he got RIGHT – the incentives of monarchs vs rentiers, and the structure of non-monopolistic formal institutions

I think we can forgive popper his open door to experimentation, and take from him what we can: that GiVEN THE FRAILTY OF OUR KNOWLEDGE, COERCIVE GOVERNMENT IS NEVER MORAL and never can be.

Popper’s prohibition on truth claims is a moral one. And given that Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe are all WRONG in the interpretation of truth claims of Praxeology, and the structure of economic science, we’ve simply proven that not only is Popper RIGHT, but Popper has told us how to correct praxeology. Or at least that is how i was able to understand how to correct praxeology.

Unfortunately, other than Hans it’s not possible to find many libertarians smart enough to have this level of discussion with. And I suspect he won’t appreciate it much. 🙂

I need to get hans off of this argument. He’s wrong. Plain and simple. Popper is an asset not a liability. The prohibition on piecemeal engineering is one that POPPER gave us, NOT Mises.

We can never claim to know enough to forcibly use other’s money for theoretical ends. The content in our myths, habits and traditions is also more dense than our understanding of those myths, habits and traditions. We may know how to USE those traditions. But like any complex technology we may not have knowledge of their CONSTRUCTION. And we certainly cannot observe the totality of their externalities – any more than we can observe the totality of the externality of prices.

That’s Popper’s gift to us. That was Hayek’s gift to us. Hayek and Popper were closer to the answer than Mises – who, by applying Weber and Poincare, correctly understood economic calculation, but failed to grasp that economic science was not a-prioristic, but entirely empirical. He confused our ability to sympathetically test any human action for rational incentives, with the ability to deduce anything meaningful from the necessity for rational action.

Curt Doolittle

Propertarianism

Rescuing liberty from the ethics of the ghetto, one paragraph at a time.