Short post today. Read below the delicious red meat-quote on Austrian vis-a-vis Marxist or Keynesian, etc., economic theory, from an interview with Robert Higgs:
Most of all, an understanding of Austrian economics reveals that mainstream economics is the exact opposite of what it claims to be: it is not science, but scientism. Relying on crude imitation of 19th-century physics, it implicitly or explicitly assumes that human actions can be understood in the same way that natural scientists understand the motions and interactions of material particles, chemical substances, and electrical currents. Unfortunately for mainstream economics, human beings — unlike particles, chemicals, and currents — have purposes, which they choose and may change, as well as a capacity for creativity in their choice or invention of means for the attainment of their chosen ends. Only a science that recognizes the essential nature of human beings, and how they differ from material particles and electrical currents, can achieve an understanding of human action. Neoclassical economics hides its epistemological nakedness beneath a massive cloak of symbolical representations and mathematical manipulations in formal models. Once one comes to understand what is being done, and presupposed, in this nursery of playful idiots savants, one comes to see that hardly any of it will bear critical scrutiny.