A Straw Man Stuffed With Igorance.

Extreme Austrian Apriorism as the No True Scotsman Fallacy
By Jason Brennan

Brennan: “What do you think of behavioral economics that purports to show people often act irrationally in the market?”

Austrian Dude: “That doesn’t pose a problem for economics. Economics is a priori.”

Brennan: “But doesn’t it show that people don’t often act in the way your theory describes?”

Austrian Dude: “No. You see, there’s a difference between behavior and action. Action is defined as….[insert a summary of Mises's Human Action here]

Here is the missing summary:


“Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego's meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person's conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life. Such paraphrases may clarify the definition given and prevent possible misinterpretations. But the definition itself is adequate and does not need complement of commentary.”
-Mises

In short, extreme apriorism ends up being a version of the No True Scotsman Fallacy.

"The ultimate end of action is always the satisfaction of some desires of the acting man."
-Mises

I think the author of this post has a serious misunderstanding of this axiom. He also has a serious misunderstanding of the term “value free.”

Austrians don't have a view as to the objective rationality of a Human Action, only that the action taken by a human being satisfies some psychological goal. If a person is aiming to buy a tool to drive a nail is enticed by a good deal on a screwdriver and purchases that instead of a hammer, he has merely demonstrated that he values getting a bargain buying a tool more than his original goal of driving a nail. This is the "value free" nature of praxelogy, to observe human behavior and deduce the motivation.

To say this is a "No True Scotsman" fallacy is turning the facts on their head. The straw man here is "there’s a difference between behavior and action." The reality is that an Austrian would say there is no objective way to judge an action as "rational" but it is subjectively rationalized by the actor. In that light, all actions are rational. What we are actually saying is that you can't tell if a person is a Scotsman by how he acts because each individual Scotsman is capable of acting like every other human being in the world!!!

Instead, it leaves open, as an empirical question, whether actual human beings in the real world are better described by your a priori theory of human action or by behavioral economics. If your theory doesn’t account for actual human behavior very well, then it’s impotent to defend real life markets, and you shouldn’t advocate libertarianism in the real world on the basis of your Austrian economics.”

Judge for yourself, not only markets, but just about anything:

For example, let us have two men, A and B who are both faced with the choice of a lashing if they don't betray their conscience. A would rather take the lashing than betray his conscience. B betrays his conscience to avoid the lashing. We can say that praxelogically A held his own conscience at a higher value than his own body. B held avoiding physical pain in a higher value than betraying his own conscience. This observation is value free. We neither condemn A as foolish for taking a lashing or B as foolish for avoiding the lashing. However, it is as logical to conclude that such torturous methods as these are tantamount to cyanide for a civilized society being the use of brute force against an innocent persons free will.

The same would be true if we gave person A and B each $5 to go in a restaurant to order whatever they wished within that budget. Person A orders comfort food with little nutritional value and person B orders food with maximum nutritional value. We can conclude that person A was aiming at eating food that tasted good and person B was aiming at food that was good for his body. There is no objective way to judge which person made the correct choice. Both choices were correct as they both satisfied the ends the diners sought. We know A valued taste more than nutrition, but there is no objective way to compare the amount he valued taste over nutrition with B's value of nutrition over taste.

Free markets are based on voluntary exchange for mutual benefit. The state is the agency of coercion for social control. Civilization is marked by a society that can function spontaneously with the minimum amount of force and coercion. Therefore, if the end result to be attained is a maximum of civilized behavior, then the least amount of forceful intrusion into consensual exchange would seem the logical ideal to achieve this end. This is why Austrians tend to be Libertarian.

To enter the realm of ethics, allowing individuals to create their own meaning, follow their own goals, pursue their own happiness, and experience their own failures would seem to be the most just. This leads to a society where one can have what is one's own without infringing on what belongs to someone else, be it success or failure.

(Full Article)

PS I guess Brennan has redacted his original post, but I found a copy of the original here.