AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS REFUTED- Jersey Flight

I think the reason Austrians get away with so much bullshit (and make no mistake bullshit is precisely what it is) is twofold:

1) Authoritarian method.

2) They offer the guise of a rational dialectic (though upon examination this structure is found to be superficial). The problem is that most people are such poor dialecticians that this superficial structure is just enough to cause persuasion.

[It is no different in the case of Ayn Rand.]

One of the interesting things about me is that I read counterfactual literature (if my belief is not strong enough to survive then it doesn't deserve to survive). Neither do I aim at the refutation of a caricature. If there is substance I hope to find it. But this is a hard thing when it comes to abstraction, because the world is made of substance.

Essentially the Austrian view comes down to one thing (not evidence) but the affirmation of a set of arbitrary, authoritarian assumptions. But these assumptions must be given this status of authority as they do not contain it in themselves. The student must validate their asserted value in order for them to have value. 

"...it should be clear that only by means of a theory, economic and moral, which is not itself derived from experience but rather starts from a logically incontestable statement (which is something very different from an arbitrary postulated axiom) and proceeds in a purely deductive way (perhaps using some explicitly introduced empirical and empirically testable assumption, in addition) to results which are themselves logically unassailable (and thus require no empirical testing whatsoever), will it become possible to organize or interpret an otherwise, overly complex array of unconnected, isolated facts or opinions about social reality to form a true, coherent economic or moral conceptual system." A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, pg.9-10 Hans Hermann Hoppe 

The interesting thing about this quote is that Hoppe is aware of the weakness in the Austrian position and desperately tries to remedy it by asserting that it is not divorced from empiricism (he tries to make room for empiricism within the box of his suffocating theory). But the empirical reality of the "incontestable logical statement" and the promise of his assertion, regarding a testable empirical procedure, are two separate things. That which is incontestable cannot be tested! 

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