Replying to smalltownrifle

Just finished this. Already started re-reading.

I sense that there's an antidote in this book to the intellectual arrogance inspired by relativism, empiricism and nihilism that plagues my generation.

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smalltownrifle 7mo ago 💬 4

I just read an LLM-generated summary of 'Has government any role in money?' by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz

I get what Hoppe means when he criticises the use of empiricism in social sciences, especially economics.

In empiricism, you make a proposition, which may or may not be true, so it has to tested and validated through evidence and data. Even then, your proposition isn't necessarily true and is subject to falsification still.

So you're left with a situation where policy makers and governments keep testing their policies on civilians like they're lab rats.

Tyrranical policies like tariffs, financial surveillance and taxation are only bad if there is evidence and data that prove that they are bad.

Even if evidence and data say so, they don't necessarily mean the policies are bad. Somewhere, some variable needs to be tweaked and accounted for, so that the policy can be tried more effectively. The policy itself isn't bad. The lab rats on which they are tested are bad.

And so Friedman, having compared folks from the rationalist Austrian school as dogmatists/cultists in one of his public appearances, having played a role in the establishment of the strictly empiricist Chicago school, starts questioning the role of Government in the monetary market in the paper I mentioned above.

Even then, based on the summary I've been able to obtain, Friedman does not come to the correct conclusion that government has no role at all. He argues for a limited role, claiming that a free market in money is not practical due to what he believes is historical evidence, which validates another criticism that Austrian school folks like Hoppe levies on empiricists that they have a flawed understanding of causal links.

To get a glimpse of the 'other side' - rationalism, and its methodology of arriving at incontestable truths through reflective and deductive reasoning, which the Austrian school is based on, I highly recommend reading the following book in this note I mentioned:

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Muslim Bitcoiner 7mo ago

Currently reading Hoppe’s The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, which is just a collection of his essays. He goes in deep to criticize empericism in some of the essays, especially in how it relates to relativism and positivism.

Hoppe argues that bureaucrats and central bankers prefer empericism/positivism because it allows them to cloak their coercion in scientific respectability. Under positivism, no economic principle, no matter how logical or self-evident, can be accepted as true without empirical testing. This means that claims like "taxation reduces productivity" or "printing money leads to inflation" are treated as just hypotheses. That opens the door for state actors to propose the opposite, like taxation or money printing leads to prosperity, under the guise of being "open-minded experiments."

When the results inevitably disappoint, positivism gives them an escape hatch that any failure can be blamed on uncontrolled variables, not the core theory. This basically immunizes their policies from first principles based rational critique. So empericism/positivism becomes the perfect intellectual shield for power because it undermines deductive economic truths and turns every policy into a trial-and-error game where coercion is always worth “trying.”

Highly recommend reading it after you're done with Economic science and Austrian Method!

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smalltownrifle 7mo ago

Yep, that one along with 'Theory of Capitalism and Socialism' are on my reading list.

It's pretty wild that these 'open-minded' folks are enabling tyrrany while the 'dogmatic' ones are trying to fight it.