The Austrian school is pretty famous for rejecting empiricism and basically saying it's their way or nothing; it may come to valid conclusions but because they reject any evidentiary evaluation of their assumptions its unfalsifiable (and therefore not a scientific way of approaching the world)
If their conclusions didn't happen to support those in power and capital in particular, they'd be just another meaningless research group.
It's not even sarcastic. The Austrian school literally starts with assumptions that basically imply their solutions, that people always act in their best interest and so on, and reject any kind of empirical test of their theory. At all. The Austrian school assumes that these bases are absolutely and completely true, and then posit that all economic truths can be derived thereof and cannot be impacted negatively or positively by empirical evidence.
Not actually the case. You are massively overestimating the impact of praxeology on Austrian economics. Austrian economics predates praxeology for 80 years.
The problem is that you are not actual arguing against austrian economics but a political movement that has hijacked the ideas and presents itself as 'the solution' that proves their political view. This is mostly driven by some conservative finance and the 'The Mises institute', that should actually be called 'The Rothbart Institute'. As they don't really represent Austrian economics as a whole, but rather a narrow minded interpretation of Mises.
If you look at the Austrians generally and those still in academia, they do not actually work that way, and they don't reject empiricism as a whole. The reject pure empiricism and pure positivism, in favor of a individual and institutional approach that is validated by data. In practice and historically Austrian economics was much closer to what we today would consider institutional economics, Law&Economics and Political Economics.
I have years ago stopped fighting since the term has been so discredited by the mob of morons on the internet. Some economists that solidly work within Austrian tradition have stopped using that term because of those bad associations.
But I'm just telling you, your argument really is just like arguing against some Burnie fam who proclaims Keynsian economics implies socialism.
No, no it's not. It's treating economics as some bastardized version of philosophy, not math. Mathematical axioms are based on the principle that you cannot imagine an alternative axiomatic system, I can easily imagine a different axiomatic system for economics, and that the axioms cannot be empirically contradicted. And I can actually justify it empirically.
You maybe right, but not the way you interpret math. Mathematical axioms are not empirical, and contradictions do arose from those axioms. Non-Euclidean geometry[0] would be a good starting point, Russell's paradox[1] is also worth entertaining. Mathematical axioms are assumptions made that works treated as truth, not the truth taken for granted.
That's exactly my point. Mathematical axioms aren't empirically testable, and mathematics accepts many different axioms.
Praxeology doesn't accept other axioms, and the axioms it accepts are empirically testable. Which is the why math is fine but Austrian economics isn't.
Also, mathematics doesn't make claims on the real world.
That's exactly the point. Non-euclidien geometry is still geometry, and axiomatic systems without the Axiom of Choice is still math.
The Austrians start with their axioms and do not accept anyone with other axioms. And unlike mathematical axioms, their axioms are actually empirically testable.
This sounds prima facie absurd to me. Are they just throwing phrases out of Ayn Rand novels on paper and calling it science?