 Let me begin by defining the term a priori: known to be true independently of or in advance of experience of the subject matter; requiring no evidence for its validation or support. That is to say that it is a non-analytic type of reasoning.
Now allow me to address your caveat that this supposed science can tell us what will happen, but not when it will or even how it will. i would then ask you of what use is it if it cannot answer at least one of those rather crucial questions in that it gives us nothing to go on in the here and now and it is precisely in the here and now in which we must act.
To illustrate my point, let me use your first example that printing money leads to inflation. On its face it does seem to be a very sensible deduction. Yet when we look at Japan what we find is that they have been printing for the last two decades and yet they are trapped in a deflationary spiral with their currency never having had such strong purchasing power as it does now. Just how much longer must we wait until inflation rears its ugly head in Japan? i guess i should not have asked that, for as you have stated, it is unknowable. We simply must trust that it will, be it tomorrow or 687 years from now. Sorry, but that knowledge is of absolutely no use to anyone in that one cannot take action on it and expect to profit. It is no different than were i to have told you in 1920 that the Boston Red Sox are going to win the World Series. Yes, they eventually did, but you would have lost a fortune betting on them every year.
Let me also point out that boom and bust cycles have occured under a gold standard. They are not unique to a fiat system. That means that there is some other mechanism at work that you cannot explain. And it should also be noted that unemployment exists in nations without minimum wage laws, meaning that those laws cannot be the causative factor. And by your logic, should not Bernanke be the richest man on earth, for who is closer to the money production system?
And so i will say to you that contrary to your claim that all of the causal relationships you claim to exist (and that can be deduced without ever having to leave the cave) do not exist when we examine them in the cold, hard light of objective experience. Indeed, the Japanese experience alone should lead you to conclude that there is something going on that Austrians do not understand. And if all that you can come back with is that one day the Japanese will suffer inflation, but you cannot tell me when, then what you are championing is a faith based system, not science.
What von Mises has lured you in with is common sense, not immutable laws of economics. And sad to say, but common sense is often wrong, regardless of how logical it might appear at the time. (The earth orbits the sun, not the other way around.) And again, if what he claimed to come to in an a priori manner is so obvious as to require no evidence for its validation, then it ought not to be any more contentious than you telling me that you are alive. His truths are not self-evident and just like any other theory, need to be demonstrated in the cold, hard light of reality. You can deny that all you want, but what you are then
left with is a belief system that provides you with no useful information for acting in the here and now. Worse, to maintain your belief intact, you will have to ignore certain inconvenient truths, such as the boom and bust cycles that occured in America while using the gold standard.
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The saying that things may work nicely in theory, but do not necessarily work in practice is well known.[1] It is typically meant to disparage the importance of theory, suggesting it would be too far removed from practical matters to help in solving the issue at hand.
The Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in his 1793 essay "On the Popular Judgment: 'This May Be True in Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice,'" responded to such criticism; in fact, he responded with his essay to criticism leveled against his ethical theory by the philosopher ChristianGarve (1742–1798)... Lire la suite |
