I had to travel last night and was busy today, but it seems I set off a firestorm, and Tom “Learn Real History and Economics” Woods is especially annoyed with me. Some reactions:

1. If you’re going to defend “a priori” economics, learn to use the term “a priori” correctly. Michael Huemer has an excellent introduction to the concept here.  It may turn out that Rothbard wasn’t using the word correctly, and I can’t tell from Tom’s post whether he knows what the word means.  Oh well, so much the worse for them.

2. I now assume that you read Huemer’s bit and understand that a priori knowledge is knowledge that is not justified by observations. So, with that, here’s a quick explanation of why pure a priori economics cannot be used to defend any markets in the actual world: To defend actual markets, you need to know about actual causal connections among actual phenomena. But you cannot intuit causal connections among actual phenomena a priori. You can do things like trace the logical implications of concepts, analyze concepts, or look for logical connections among propositions a priori, you can do math, and you can learn about some of morality a priori. But statements of the form “A causes B,” if they are about actual stuff in the actual world, must be justified by empirical work. If Rothbard intends his economics to tell us about the actual world we live in, then he needs empirical work to show that his economic theory applies to that world.

Let’s be really clear–if you think pure a priori economics can be used to defend actual markets, you are thereby committed to the view that we can intuit or determine actual causal connections in the world a priori. (Can you imagine someone saying, “Without doing any empirical work or making an observations, I determined that eating fluoride cures toenail fungus!”? That person would be a quack. In contrast, you can do stuff like develop models a priori, but statements of the form “Model M explains actual phenomena P” must always be justified in part by observations.

Any responses of the form, “But that’s not what Rothbard or whoever meant by ‘a priori’!”, if accurate, just mean that Rothbard or whoever didn’t use the term “a priori” correctly.

3. I haven’t attacked Mises at all. Sure, Austrian Dude in my story mentioned Mises, and I said Austrian Dude’s argument was unsound, but that doesn’t mean I have a problem with Mises. Mises was a real scholar who made real contributions. Mises and Hayek, good; Rothbard and Hermann-Hoppe, very bad.

4. Someone suggested to Tom that he debate me on a radio show or something. He responds, “I don’t see the point in elevating him. No one knows who he is. It is better for mankind for things to stay that way.” What a preposterous response. Tom, you can’t possibly do anything to elevate me or help my career.

5. I was presenting Why Not Capitalism? to Arizona’s philosophy department today. In Why Not Capitalism?, there’s a point where I complain that   G.A. Cohen often claims that capitalism engenders bad character and motivations, but Cohen doesn’t supply the needed empirical work to verify those claims. On the contrary, I say, insofar as there is empirical work on this issue, the weight of the evidence say that Cohen is mistaken, and in fact capitalism makes people better. Two grad students said that Marx would claim that, no, this can’t be settled empirically, because it’s built into the idea of capitalism that it makes people have certain motivations, and we can know through a priori analysis that capitalism causes bad motivations. I recounted to them my explanation of why pure a priori economics can’t tell us anything, on its own, about the actual world, and then pointed out that Marx, on their interpretation of him, suffers from the same problem. Marx:* “C causes E.” Me: “The evidence says C causes not-E.” Marx: “No, I meant ‘C causes E’ to be a conceptual claim that can’t be falsified.” Bogus theorizing.

*N.B.: I take no stance on whether this interpretation of Marx is correct.