– one system is wherein people do things that work well for them over time, and thus keep doing them, while discarding behaviors that work poorly for them. think of mises’ “removal of felt unease” inherent to all intentional action.

– the other meta-system (containing two similar but separable systems) that creates repeated intentional goal-oriented behavior is one of a poor, empirical, weak system of trial-and-error; violence: i hold a gun to your head so you tie my shoe, or differently, i take certain political actions, either before or after i test their popularity with others (through politics). these political (political in the typical, not the ancap “politics = violence” sense) actions can again be split into two: ex ante and ex post: politicians put something to a vote, then decide whether to implement it or not, or politicians implement a policy, then see how well it is received, and adjust thereafter (all laws made follow this model).

this is similar to franz oppenheimer’s differentiation between the “economic means” and the “political means.” however, i aim to explicate this on a higher level (like logic vs metalogic or science vs epistemology).

one meta-system is wherein the system allows the best actions to be eventually taken with trial-and-error, the other, at best, is one where policymakers guess the best actions through trial and error then impose them on large numbers of people (which obviously retards the process of properly guessing the right course of action). one is where people do things right or wrong, and directly act accordingly, hence the “direct system of systems.” the other, where people try to guess right and wrong, ultimately itself is the whole of politics, and that is still if democratic republics (be they libertarian or authoritarian) become perfectly efficient, a la the new-classicists’ “rational [perfect] expectations,” but perfect modeling of correct human interaction, which is completely impossible, just as an aside.

for example, i am convinced that in a stateless (no second, aka guessing-for-others, meta-system) people would either stop using hard drugs, or use them in such a way that their productivity wouldn’t be hindered more than the relative subjective value that is accommodated for in the market (which is ultimately the aim of all micro- and macro-economic events). this is like how walter block mentions doctors that have been addicts for years and still perform their jobs properly: their habits have been made less harmful to their lifestyles, and thus integrated, in a misesian sense of purposeful action. i am not in favor of people using hard drugs, by any means. i obviously think there should be no laws governing medication/drugs/remedies/whatever, because markets will eventually figure out the relative desires for, and proper use of, whatever substance people come up with.

this is why i take such an epistemological stance against positivism, but not empiricism. however, in the same way, empiricism is itself imperfect, whereas deduction is not. the problem with deduction is not its potential inaccuracy, but its frequent inapplicability (or at least our present inability to apply it). however, the problem with empiricism is that it cannot produce any perfectly-knowable piece of information, and especially that aggregative/variable-minimizing empirical work is either too broad to be useful or too complex and specific to be fully knowable, instead stabs in the dark. empirical verification of a theory only proves that some variables or relations thereof are contingent with the theory. this is why positivism will never produce truly knowable knowledge. however, using empiricism to disprove theories can be useful in sciences that normally have trouble with empiricism; nobody tells someone else they are not an austrian for pointing out that stagflation blew a major hole in keynesian theory.

but again, empiricism helps show the coherency and applicability of deductive syntheses of prior axioms plus what can be derived from larger axioms, which of course have no limit of configurations because of the nature of logic, you just have to approximate the best one for the situation, like an inverse positivism, or something. despite this, the better logicians remain conservative in their epistemological standards of applicability to modern social and economic theory.

so in a relevant praxeological sense, though central planning cannot prove its policies perfect or even correct, individuals can point out where the planners are clearly not taking optimal (or even beneficial) action. furthermore, the centralization of planning discoordinates the very systems it intends to plan. abct and all that aside, systemic planning of market systems; which themselves ultimately are just a network of human interaction, as in a sense, all interaction is praxeological but has various effects on economics. economics is really just the market-education showing how to view the sum of sociology; all in total contrast to most sociologists, marx, heidegger, et al. no doubt though some, like max weber, made some legitimate contributions, even as a hermeneutician, as lachmann dabbled in. he, however, came from an epistemologically austrian viewpoint taken to its extreme: no equilibrium of human interaction as a whole, just time scrambling everything up, and everything made perhaps better or worse, with stabilizing and destabilizing forces stable or unstable themselves, etc. however, he made major contributions to the deeper austrian understanding of capital during the boom-bust cycle, i would submit, as much as mises, hayek, and rothbard. hell, rothbard cited him in his main treatise on economics: man, economy, and state.

look at laws against jury nullification (to some degree or another). i’m no fan of direct democracy, but even if the courts can pick a perfect set of peers, generally don’t they see the same peer on trial as either an aggressor or an innocent? again a tangential point, but even in the court system, the blanket application of anti-nullification laws blatantly obstructs the efficiency of justice to be properly delivered, and i think the state overinvestments AND malinvestments in courts, a government bubble that follows from washington and state capitols to everyone that gets a position running the EPA or helping create aggregative models that supposedly should be able to substitute a given person’s demand for water: how do you know some guy isn’t using a bunch of water to develop a faster or cleaner or smarter or cheaper way to deliver it? oh, he tells you, you invest, or you are a local (state-granted) monopoly, so of course politically-sanctioned cocoon bubble-company weed resorts to saying “fuck you, i’ll make more rippin people off cuz prez dummy said it’s dope.”

now go eat some sushi and read a book.