Skeptic Project

All I know is everyone who believes in it also believes in all kinds of other really, really stupid stuff.

They think if we switch to the gold standard that poor people won't exist. Which is true because they would all die.

= Shit

Does that answer my own question, more or less?

No wonder I've never heard anything that makes sense from them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School#Criticism_of_the_Austrian_School</p>

In a word: unscientific

It's one thing to point out flaws in a scientific experiment or to be skeptical of its results, but to reject anything empirical is completely stupid. And they're probably just doing it to defend their worldview from the facts.

Austrian economics is a broad historical term describing economists from Austria that contributed to developing certain additional fundamental rules of economics with the angle of non-governmental intervention (some did not mine the government being part of certain economic decisions). In general, they reject forecasting models and metrics (some don't mine forecasting) due to the unpredictability of human actions and favor deduction instead like with the price mechanism. But some may mistakenly think they reject the scientific method all together because of this.

Never the less, the label "Austrian economist" can come with misconceptions since each individual who may follow the theories, may not all believe in the same things, but will be place in the same boat.

For instance, You have those who just follow the fundamental, post classical economical rules like subjective theory of value, marginal utility, , etc. people like Carl Menger contributed.

Then you have those from the Mises crowd (right-wing libertarians) who follow those basic economic rules but are hard core gold standard backers and want to abolish the Fed Reserve.

And you have those who are of the left libertarian side of things and for an economy that is more egalitarian and mutualistic.

Then you have those that despite there being a Fed Reserve or State central banking now, they won't mine seeing more banking and currency systems alongside it where people will have more options.

The first and the last two to me are the ones that come off level headed.

Austrian economics probably would have faded into obscurity decades ago if some American businessmen like the Koch brothers hadn't kept it going artificially. The Austrian economics obsessives have to give their literature away because nobody really wants it.

Contrast Austrian economics with its sometime ally Objectivism. Ayn Rand sounds crazier with each new biography; but her novels sell on their own through market demand, like all those novels about vampires in high school.