Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

HERETICS WANTED!

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RE:

Kinsella: I am not sure if what you are saying here is merely a folksy and idioscyncratic way of restating what Austrians like Hoppe, Mises, Rothbard have already said, or if this is supposed to be saying something different. IF so, I don’t quite follow you.

“Curt Doolittle Hoppe was right about everything. He just didn’t solve the problem of causality.”

Kinsella: …. It is not clear what the “problem of causality” is…? What would it mean to solve it?

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Folksy? Constructivism and Intuitionism are not folksy. What’s folksy is “I’m a simple libertarian”. 🙂

If you’re using as a refutation, then what have Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe said? (I know. I’ve read it all – and heard it over and over again.)

What I find interesting is that praxeology, in most cases, my most libertarians, is used an attack on positivism (true) but positivism is different from empiricism – and empiricism turned out to provide a lot of insights that praxeology failed to.(Sticky prices etc.) The problem is, that empirical analysis of economic data has told us a LOT about human cooperation..

So I don’t think I need to debate that empiricism (versus positivism) is more powerful than deduction from first principles.

I don’t think I need to debate the canons of science nor the requirements of the scientific method. Enough people have done that.

I don’t think I need to debate that little to nothing can be deduced from the ‘Axiom’ and its postulates. Enough people have done that.

Given that we already use a logic of identity, a logic of relations, and a logic of causation, each of which is a test of internal consistency, I don’t think I have to debate that a logic of cooperation does not exist yet.

So, then, what remains of Praxeology? A hollow attack on positivism that no one practices anyway? A misguided attack on empiricism? A mistaken classification of praxeology as apodictically certain and deductively powerful?

So if it’s ‘BEEN SAID” then what has been said that survives?

We can either reform praxeology into a formal logic of cooperation (more precise than Ostrom’s more general institutional rules, but the same principle applies), which can be used to test statements for internal consistency (proof) just as logic, math and physics(science) are used for the purposes of testing internal consistency, or we can simply abandon the entire Austrian program as a yet another pseudoscience of the Cosmopolitans like marx, freud and cantor gave us.

So, rather than throw it all out (which is an option) and leave the Austrians to the dustbin of history, perhaps it’s preferable to resurrect praxeology as a formal logic predicated on empirical evidence, and used to test the internal consistency of economic theories (and moral statements), and empirical economics (the study of demonstrated preferences) and experimental psychology (the study of cognitive biases).

Because there is no reason that the insights provided by Mises, rothbard and Hoppe that are NOT pseudoscientific, should be left on the margins of political economy, unavailable to those of us who desire liberty, because they’re morally incompatible with the high trust society, and argued in (pitiful) continental rationalism, rather than FORMAL LOGIC AND EMPIRICAL SCIENCE.

It is quite possible I’ve just spent time studying enough fields that I’m not lost in the libertarian reality distortion field. But that’s the purpose of ideologies and religions: to distort reality through repetition of empty verbalisms rather than scientific correspondence with reality.

-HERETICS WELCOME-

Liberty doesn’t have to be constructed as a pseudoscience for stupid people. Liberty was produced by the organized use of violence to suppress all free riding of all forms, leaving only productive exchange of private property remaining.

And if we are to possess liberty once again, it will be by the organized application of violence to demand it.

Cheers.