Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the What Is Money Show. I'm thrilled today to be sitting down again with Mr. Jimmy Song. And we're actually doing a little bit of backtracking. So we had started with chapter one of the book by

Hoppe titled Democracy, the God that Failed. But Jimmy pointed out to me that the introduction

contains some real gems as well. So we're going to jump back into the introduction of the book,

actually, and start with this exploration of empiricism versus

rationalism or I guess what we could say is a priori knowledge which will explain and define

versus experimentally derived or empirically derived knowledge.

So I'm going to start.

I'll just read an excerpt in the book and then we'll open the discussion with that.

Hoppe says, quote, if one is to make a rational choice among such rival and incompatible interpretations, this is only possible if one has a theory at one's disposal, or at least a theoretical proposition, whose validity does not depend on historical experience, but can be established a priori, i.e. once and for all by means of the intellectual apprehension or comprehension of the nature of things.

Unquote.

So just to start there, I mean, the way he's describing this in my mind is you have to have a philosophical anchoring into the world that's intellectually derived before you can interpret

your observations. Whereas in the modern world, we tend to think the reverse. It's like we need

to observe it through experimentation first to prove it, quote unquote, before it's real.

Yeah, and this is a lot of Austrian economics, actually, is looking, and he points

this out in the introduction, where you look at historical events, and for a lot of historians,

they don't understand the economics.

They don't necessarily have a good grounding. So they just

sort of describe what happened. It's like this many people were killed at this battle and

the economy tanked by this much on this state or something like that. And his point is that,

well, that's good and fine, but it doesn't give you any satisfying,

like, reasoning for what actually happened when.

And the only way to really get that or to inject meaning into these events is to have

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