Natural Law Liberalism and the Philosophy of Economics

Monetary and fiscal policy make up the final interface between government and the people to be examined in this work. The challenge facing government ministers at the moment is that economics as a discipline is in disarray following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. This event has done more to damage collective confidence in the social order of Modernity than any other, with many now calling for defection from the basics of market economics. The natural law liberal thus faces two challenges: The first is to shore up confidence in market economic principles; and second, to light upon solid policy recommendations in the domains of monetary and fiscal policy. The natural law liberal has an unexpected advantage in this arena, for the science of economics was developed first by natural law theorists. Chapter 7 presents this account of the philosophy of science and economics and its subsequent development by Carl Menger and Walter Eucken, illustrated by Irving Fisher’s work on the root cause of depressions. An important lesson to be drawn here is that the orthodox philosophy of economics, the positivism of the likes of Milton Friedman, must be rejected.