Q&A: WHAT DOES MORALITY HAVE TO DO WITH ECONOMICS?
Immorality = impediment to cooperation and incentive to retaliation and its consequence to the voluntary organization reproduction, of production of goods, services, commons, dispute resolution, and defense – vs it’s opposite.
That which we defend (property) = that which we have expended our resources in order to obtain by homesteading, transformation(production), or productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer limited to externalities of the same criteria.
Property Rights = That scope of property which we reciprocally insure against the imposition of costs by others.
Criminal = imposition of costs by direct physical means.
Unethical = imposition of costs by interpersonal asymmetry of information.
Immoral = imposition of costs indirectly extra-personal asymmetry of information.
Macro interference does not consist of productive, fully informed, warrantied voluntary transfer limited to externality of the same criteria.
When we study Saltwater interference (discretionary Pareto maximums) we study the greatest immorality possible. (rule by discretion)
When we study Freshwater macro we study rule of law (insured, systemic non-discretionary maximums). (rule of law)
When we study Austrian economics (non-discretionary Nash maximums), we study the greatest morality possible. (social science)
As in many things, the middle road appears to be the optimum possible. It permits planning but provides insurance against asymmetries in the system.
Ergo: the question is a moral one: who has discretion to cause indirect involuntary transfers that we cannot plan for?
Mises discovered operationalism in economics. Operationalism is a means of constructing proofs of possibility (falsification attempts / tests of existential possibility ).
But economics, like any discipline, and all of epistemology, remains scientific in the sense that science refers to warranties of due diligence that our observations(facts) and hypotheses(guesses) are laundered of all humanly possible error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, pseudoscience, overloading, propaganda, and deceit.
It does not matter if we discover a pattern in reality by free association(accident), by empirical observation(top down), or by operational construction (bottom up). To make a truth proposition we must ensure that our speech is free of error -> deceit by tests of:
1 – categorical consistency
2 – logical consistency
3 – empirical consistency
4 – operational consistency
5 – moral consistency (reciprocity)
6 – scope consistency (parsimony, limits and full accounting)
Mises did discover that in economics or in explanation of any human action whatsoever, we can construct a proof (test of possibility) using operational language (existential consistency), of moral consistency (reciprocal voluntary transfer), just as Spencer had previously illustrated in all of human experience.
But mises attempted (falsely) to conflate science (falsification/warranty) with logic (test of internal consistency) as instead of as tests of natural law: the necessity of voluntary exchange free of incentive for retaliation.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev Ukraine
(ps: You would be far better served following me than rothbard or hoppe)
Source date (UTC): 2016-09-09 01:42:00 UTC