Probably one of the major difficulties with modern Liberalism, or at least some versions of it, is that, like Marxism, it is based on purely rational, deductive thinking. In his opus magna Human Action Ludwig von Mises goes as far as saying that Economics, seen as the science of human action or Praxeology, is a purely deductive science. You start out with some axioms regarding human behaviour, including the axiom of rationality, then by a process involving pure logic you establish its theorems. According to Mises, the theorems of Praxeology are true independently of reality. Reality does not matter, it can never prove or disprove a paraxeological theorem.
People in real life often act non-rationally because of lack of information, emotions, prejudice, superstition, bad-faith or some other reason. If this is so, then Mises' science of human action becomes a World of its own, with no relation to the real World. It is certainly an interesting World prone to intellectual debate. But you cannot anymore claim that such debate is relevant to reality, except if you force reality to fit the theory. The theory is thus converted into an ideology and the social scientist becomes an ideologue, if not a revolutionary whose main intellectual attribute is purposeful ignorance or distortion of reality.
Let me just give an example. Consider the case of education. Marxists argue for a system of education in which schools are owned by the government and they consider this the best system of all. Liberals, on the other hand, argue that the best system of education is one where schools are owned by private, profit-seeking, competitive firms. Both groups defend their respective positions with a large number of arguments, sometimes sophisticated ones.
Both are wrong, though. And both are wrong because they do not care for reality, but only to their respective theories which incidentally were not developed to fit reality. The best system of education for Portugal is neither a state-sponsored system nor a system based on competititive, privately owned schools. The best system of education is a system where schools are operated by the Church.
The ranking of secondary schools published annually in Portugal shows, beyond the shade of a doubt, that it is the Church, not government or private firms, the best educator in the country. Year after year the Church puts nine of her schools among the top-10 schools in the country. Yet nobody talks about it, nobody really cares for it, because everybody is too much busy with ideology to take notice of reality.
People in real life often act non-rationally because of lack of information, emotions, prejudice, superstition, bad-faith or some other reason. If this is so, then Mises' science of human action becomes a World of its own, with no relation to the real World. It is certainly an interesting World prone to intellectual debate. But you cannot anymore claim that such debate is relevant to reality, except if you force reality to fit the theory. The theory is thus converted into an ideology and the social scientist becomes an ideologue, if not a revolutionary whose main intellectual attribute is purposeful ignorance or distortion of reality.
Let me just give an example. Consider the case of education. Marxists argue for a system of education in which schools are owned by the government and they consider this the best system of all. Liberals, on the other hand, argue that the best system of education is one where schools are owned by private, profit-seeking, competitive firms. Both groups defend their respective positions with a large number of arguments, sometimes sophisticated ones.
Both are wrong, though. And both are wrong because they do not care for reality, but only to their respective theories which incidentally were not developed to fit reality. The best system of education for Portugal is neither a state-sponsored system nor a system based on competititive, privately owned schools. The best system of education is a system where schools are operated by the Church.
The ranking of secondary schools published annually in Portugal shows, beyond the shade of a doubt, that it is the Church, not government or private firms, the best educator in the country. Year after year the Church puts nine of her schools among the top-10 schools in the country. Yet nobody talks about it, nobody really cares for it, because everybody is too much busy with ideology to take notice of reality.
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