OK, what if I wanted one true scotsman, but instead I got 5274 of them, all wearing kilts and eating porridge and playing bagpipes?
If something is purely axiomatic, is it science?
I mean, do we call mathematics “science”?
Economics at least pretends to be based on empirical reality, but there tends to be a lot of shaky assumptions in economics as taught.
It wasn’t my intention to defend Menger’s defintion, just to post it so we knew what we were talking about. In fact, that’s what I meant when I said we’d “descend” into a debate about what a “good” is. “Descend”, as in start a discussion that I think most people will lose interest in. Me included. 
If sauerkraut is going for $1 a pound, I assume that money is a viable currency. Why woud you* not* want something that you could convert to $10,000 for an investrment of $1?
You have to be prepared to do that conversion. Going into business selling sauerkraut isn’t a walk in the park.
Fine. Sell it a huge discount. The point is money can be exchanged for goods. Why pass up a chance to make a little money at no risk?
What ultrafilter said. If 5 tons of sauerkraut suddenly showed up on my doorstep with a note saying I owned it, I wouldn’t think “hey, free money!”, I’d think “how the fuck am I going to get to work with all this sauerkraut blocking my door (and my neighbor’s door, and possibly the freeway which is 20 feet from my doorstep)”.
Or, "If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
You don’t seem to understand. If your actions contradict the axioms, there is something wrong with you, not the axioms. 
Because you are assigning a value to money in the first case and ignoring it in the second case.
How about if it showed up in a walkin refrigerater you owned, conveniently packed in 1 pound boxes? And Octoberfest had just started.
Well, then I might be happy to have it, but it’s irrelevant. As things stand right now, I’d be happy to have a pound of sauerkraut in my possession and pissed off to have 5 tons of it. Even if I could sell it and make some money, I probably wouldn’t want to – it would be more hassle than it’s worth. And yes, that does mean I’d be turning down “free” money.
O.K. Thanks for the response.
Rightly or wrongly, Austrian economics isn’t very influential. Most professional and academic economists barely know what it is. They’ve read Hayek’s Information paper and Menger on the orgins of money, and that’s about it.
Modern economists accept the Austrians point about the impossibility of socialist calculation and then - to the bewilderment of the Austrians - happily build models that assume the calculation is quite possible. The neoclassical types (and most others) don’t mind because they see themselves as building models to do economics. Models are always wrong. They start from incorrect assumptions and use imperfect data to reach predictions that will be wrong. But better than nothing.
And that’s one ongoing difficulty with economics: “something beats nothing” vs “looking for the keys under the lamp-post because the light’s better than where I dropped them”. Sure, prediction is not really possible in economics. But if the US auto industry asks me how a change in China’s coal tariff will affect it, I can - with the aid of a neoclassical general equilibrium model and some data - make a much more sensible guess than no guess at all. But of course, when I’m wrong, it won’t be really clear whether it’s because some big shock (a big earthquake) came and changed things or because my theory is tractable, but wrong.
It’s amusing to note that in the substantial chunk of some bloke quoted by WillMagic, there are a couple of glaring errors:
This is rubbish. It would only be true if all prices adjusted instantaneously. (How fast do they adjust? Empirical question. Why do they adjust at different speeds in different markets? Theoretical question. Are unions a major cause of these nominal rigidities? Empirical question. Why are contracts of employment long term and incomplete? Theoretical question…)
This is an empirical regularity. Theory in fact tells us that upward sloping demand curves could exist (Giffen goods). That’s model-building neoclassical theory, of course.
To be fair, those were used as examples of a priori logical propositions as opposed to post priori empirical statements. It makes no difference to his point whether they are true or false. “2 + 2 = 5” is as much an a priori proposition as “2 + 2 = 4.”
That’s all that I’m saying. So long as the premises are reasonable, and the inferences are drawn in accordance with rules applied to well formed formulas, I accept the conclusion reached — no matter whether I agreed with it before or not. After all, if reason did not trump experience, we could not account for optical illusions. That said, if an argument is merely valid but not sound, then it is not sufficiently compelling to cause me to reject contradictions out of hand. Not all of the Austrian school (and certainly not all of the Chicago school) is good deduction. But that which is, is definitively reliable. I’m not sure that you and I disagree at all, frankly.
Even money doesn’t work like this. There have been many cases of a person winning the lottery and having their life ruined as a result.
We don’t now, I just needed this expansion of your position.
I have some interesting thoughts on this but I’ll have to post them later because I’m holding a baby right now.
I really don’t see how you could get that from this (my emphasis)
Can you speak to why they haven’t read Human Action, the very source of derivation for the school?
But that wasn’t one you included in your post. In fact, Hoppe himself dealt with that one specifically, stating that living standards can only be higher despite higher taxes; i.e., there is some cause to the higher living standard other than higher taxes.