The Austrian school is an alternative to the positivistic Neoclassical school that uncritically applies the methods of the physical sciences to the social sciences. The neoclassicals try to make economics look like physics by employing the quantitative approaches of the natural sciences and by searching for quantitative laws, predictive ability, and the statistical significance of changes in variables. Austrians are contemptuous of, and attack, mainstream economists for their pretensions as scientists and for their development of mathematical models that disregard a great deal of human nature and the uncertainty of expectations. Empiricism is appropriate for the purposeless realm of the natural sciences but not for the field of purposeful human action. Because the Austrians see man as a purposeful being who thinks, plans, decides, and acts, they repudiate the neoclassical, positivist, and historical ideas of man as a dependent variable in a system of equations, as a mere quantitative physical object, or as passive objects controlled by history.

          Austrian Economics is an excellent alternative way of looking at economics with respect to the appraisal of means but not of ends. Misesian praxeology therefore must be augmented. Its value-free economics is not sufficient to establish a total case for liberty. A systematic, reality-based ethical system must be discovered to firmly establish the argument for individual liberty. Natural law provides the groundwork for such a theory and both Objectivism and the Aristotelian idea of human flourishing are based on natural law ideas.
 

Establishing the case for a free society

          An ethical system must be developed and defended in order to establish the case for a free society. An Aristotelian ethics of naturalism states that moral matters are matters of fact and that morally good conduct is that which enables the individual agent to make the best possible progress toward achieving his self-perfection and happiness. According to Rand, happiness relates to a person's success as a unique, rational human being possessing free will. We have free choice and the capacity to initiate our own conduct that enhances or hinders our flourishing as human beings. Rand's philosophy of Objectivism is a systematic and integrated unity in which ethics is related to the concept of value, which, in turn, is related to an objective epistemology and a reality-based metaphysics.

          Both economists and ethicists are concerned with human choice and human action. Human action, the subject of both economics and morality, is the common denominator and the link between economic principles and moral principles. Both economic law and moral law are derived from natural law. Because truth is consistent, it follows that economics and morality are inextricably related parts of one indivisible body of knowledge. Because natural law regulates the affairs of men, it is the task of both economists and philosophers to discover the natural order and to adhere to it. There is an intimate connection between economic science and an objective, normative framework for understanding human life.

          My new book, Philosophers of Capitalism: Menger, Mises, Rand and Beyond, looks to the future and to the potential interaction and integration of Austrian Economics and Objectivism into a logical and systematic worldview. In particular, a model is offered that combines Misesian Austrian praxeology and methodology, as rehabilitated by the natural-law-oriented Rothbard, with Rand's Objectivism and the Aristotelian philosophy of human flourishing. An attempt is made to integrate these seemingly disparate areas of thought into a broad natural law and natural-rights-based analytic and normative science of liberty.