Further ruminations on the idiocy of Libertarianism

Here is another really good point on Libertariamism, from What's wrong with libertarianism.

Distaste for facts isn't merely a habit of a few Internet cranks; it's actually libertarian doctrine, the foundation of the 'Austrian school'. Here's Ludwig von Mises in Epistemological Problems of Economics:

As there is no discernible regularity in the emergence and concatenation of ideas and judgments of value, and therefore also not in the succession and concatenation of human acts, the role that experience plays in the study of human action is radically different from that which it plays in the natural sciences. Experience of human action is history. Historical experience does not provide facts that could render in the construction of a theoretical science services that could be compared to those which laboratory experiments and observation render to physics. Historical events are always the joint effect of the cooperation of various factors and chains of causation. In matters of human action no experiments can be performed. History needs to be interpreted by theoretical insight gained previously from other sources.

The 'other sources' turn out to be armchair ruminations on how things must be. It's true enough that economics is not physics; but that's not warrant to turn our backs on the methods of science and return to scholastic speculation. Economics should always move in the direction of science, experiment, and falsifiability. If it were really true that it cannot, then no one, including the libertarians, would be entitled to strong belief in any economic program.

There is no set of ideas that government can safely act on unless they come from a tradition of science, experiment, and falsifiability.Government acts on behavior, not on what people think. If there are no facts which can be established as "True" by using scientific methods, then government is demanding the right to tell you how to think. That is religious or ideological coercion by government. History has clearly demonstrated that such coercion of thought or belief always leads to rebellion, the cost of which exceeds the expected benefits of the government effort.