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@ Muslim Bitcoiner
2025-05-08 02:24:19
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!