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AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS.

Richard Ebeling has been posting old photos of Austrians we admire. Today we see Roger Garrison. (I have a long standing man crush on Roger Garrison’s brain, and am profoundly envious of his lecturing skills.)

The post reminds me that my criticism of Austrian Economics is limited to the positioning by Mises and then Rothbard of Praxeology as a deductive a priori ‘science’ rather than an empirical science like any other. And that they confuse introspective observation and conclusions from introspection as somehow different from external observation, instrumentation, and the reduction of complexity to analogies to perception, which are then subject to introspective analysis. In other words, this whole kantian nonsense is an erroneous edifice upon which to build the mythology that economics does not require instrumentalism for the purpose of observing emergent phenomenon. Just because we can never predict those phenomenon, does not mean we cannot learn the nature of man and cooperation from them. And as such we are open to terrible criticism for anti-empiricism which is merely an error in the fundamental understanding of the human cognitive process.

As I’ve stated, praxeology is not so much ‘true’ as it is ethical. Because by reducing economic statements to operational langage, subject to individual perception as a series of actions, it becomes possible to test wether or not any action is moral – ie: a change in state of property is rationally voluntary. So the value in praxeology is not in its ability to assist us in deducing economic rules, but it is in ensuring that economic statements adhere to moral realism, by requiring moral operationalism. That this is the same requirement we hold scientists to in the presentation of their theories might be lost on people. But it is precisely for this moral constraint that we hold scientists accountable for their statements. The same is true for economic statements. They are as immoral as unscientific statements in the physical sciences, whenever those statements are not reducible to a sequence of operations, each of which we can sympathize with and test for the rationality of the incentives, as to whether the change in state of property would be rationally voluntary or not. That we have been on a century long dead end because of Jewish Cosmopolitan logic compounded by German Continental logic (if you want to take the great leap of calling either of them logical) is unfortunate but a common mistake in philosophy readily solved yet again by science – this time cognitive science.

However, other than this argumentative fallacy, the basic insight that (a) political intervention is immoral and unethical (b) that it exacerbates booms and busts (c) that it may in the long term distort an economy, a state, a culture, and even a civilization to the point of collapse is something I see no way of contradicting. And the only reason it is a problem is because we are victims of well meaning fools, rather than a set of small states all experimenting so that we ‘fail small’ even if we wish to experiment with economic immorality.