This is post from the Zeitgeist Movement.
Please could you judge if their words carry any truth for you.
Critque of the book “Economics in one lesson”
Anyone who calls logical deduction “guessing” isn’t worth the time to debunk.
The anti free marketeers must either be retarted, ignorant or sinister. Calling deduction guessing is laughable. Until recently I thought most were ignorant but only needing about 5 mins with some reasonably intelligent people to explain the cause of the depression and why throwing money at it doesn’t work, I have come to the conclusion that more than I expected must be sinister. Rothbard’s Conspiracy of History becomes truer by the day.
"First of all, let me state that Free Market economists reject using the scientific method to analyze the economy. They reject the use of statistics, mathematics, and any form of collected data on the subject, claiming that there are far too many variables for any such data to be useful. So instead they use what they call “logical deductions”. A fancy way of saying that they “guess”.
As a Libertarian and former Free Market/Austrian economist myself I remember well what changed my mind and woke me up to the fact that this concept could not work anymore in our modern society. I will share some of that insight here.
Considering he considers a priori - taking a guess, I highly doubt it.
The Zeitgeist clowns are essentially anarcho-communists. No state and they’re collectivists. They reject private ownership of the means of production , but then also “criticize” in name the Communists etc (public ownership of the means of production) whilst replacing it with the exact same system, which is essentially the public ownership of the means of production. Some super computer. Technocracy is a joke. They are a new age faith movement. Can’t be reasoned with and really not worth the time.
The ONLY valuable piece of information obtained from that thread :
"Economics in One Lesson, Bestseller in China
Chinese edition 《一课经济学》.
It has entered the bestseller list from Oct 2008, which means 20,000-30,000 in less than six months."
Awesome! Why haven’t I seen a blog about this? [:)]
Check this one…
And the moderator replies:
Sure he doesn’t even know what a real wage mean.
Exciting. Maybe China will have a revolution, institute a liberal constitution, see phenomenal economic growth, have a civil war, then try to assert its latent hegemony over the world.
The first person to respond has this gem: “not only does that book, communism, and socialism not address technological unemployment and planned obsolescence but they also do not address how to rid the world of most harmful behaviours which are mostly caused by scarcity and scarcity is caused by money”
'scarcitiy is caused by money?" how can anyone believe that? I thought it was caused by…there not being an infinite amount of each thing in world…
All knowledge is guesswork. There is no logical foundation or support–those metaphors are almost entirely misleading. (They tend to lead people to completely misconstrue the logical relation between propositions).
It is no criticism of a proposition to note the source of some expression of it. In other contexts, this is referred to as the genetic fallacy, that is, judging the legitimacy of a proposition by its means of expression, method of arrival, or source.
I’ve noticed whenever someone is too stupid to deal with Austrian arguments they begin by whining about this chimaera called the “scientific method”.
Still, we need a complete debunk. Keynesians are stupid, does that stop Austrians from debunking them?
Of course, because the purpose of a “scientific method” is to deligitimise anyone you disagree with. That is just the world we live in, unfortunately. Intellectuals are forever designing new methods by which it is only possible to come to a conclusion they agree with. They then call this method “science”, and then dismiss everything they do not agree with as unscientific. It’s almost comical, really.
This would actually be much more fun to debunk…
It is obvious that those who make this remark do not themselves understand the “scientific method”. Scientific method does NOT mean equations and statistics. The key to the scientific method is substantiating or refuting an hypothesis by controlled experiments. Controlled experimentation is the key to infer causation to a phenomenon.
Since it is obvious that mainstream economics do not and cannot perform controlled experiments to verify their mathematical hypothesis, they are certainly NOT using the scientific method either. And since they have completely ignored praxeology, it is the Keynesians and monetarists who are relying on a purely mystical methodology.
Right. And without a philosophical background it’s very easy to mistake what Mises (as well as Menger or Hayek or Rothbard &c.) is saying, and then all too easily to evoke the “scientific method” as a bludgeon to deal with positions regarded as undesirable (yet whose veracity it is difficult to assault logically) and brush them off as “mystical” or “religious”.
Very nice, they are talking about a socialist society.
I think the only valid refutation to this nonsense is the Economic calculation problem in the absent of free markets.
You must admit, they are very ambitious:
But with their economic system, the following may be more down to earth reality:
I laughed out loud when I got to that part, and I had to just stop reading.
And therein lies the key fallacy in this guy’s entire argument, other than having no clue what Austrian economics is actually about.
Science is based on hypotheses that can be falsified. Basically, you need to be able to prove things. Well, the only way to prove things is to isolate variables, change one variable, and observe changes. That is impossible to do in the economy.
There are 2 ways to know things: deduction and induction. Austrians and most philosophers use deduction. Scientists use induction. Both are equally valid, no reason to criticize deduction. However, induction can’t really be used with the economy because it’s too complicated to break down.
Damn it, not the Venus project again. I debunked it a year ago on RonPaulForums.com. “Resource-based economy!” Where one can simply enter the storage room and take all food he wishe without depleting the stock of it, not unlike communism.
Wow I had never heard of this Venus Project thing… at least they come out and admit they are ignoring scarcity instead of just doing it. I think that pretty much debunks it right away
I think this is a very good summary of the common critique of scientism in economics.