Firstly, “controlled experiments” is simply an ideal which is no more achieved in the physical sciences than in the social ones. The various experimental methods employed by scientists differ only in the degree to which they’re uncontrolled. Popperian falsifiability has been criticized in all scientific contexts for these reasons. I believe that Quine’s discussions of this issue are the best-known… suffice to say, the Austrians need to come up with a better reason for dismissing the scientific method as applied to economics versus the scientific method as applied to other disciplines—but alas, this would probably require them to wade into the kind of messy empirical issues which they seem to abhor.
Secondly, even if scientific knowledge of economic phenomena could be rejected for the above reasons, the fact is that Austrian economists still routinely make empirical predictions based on praxeological reasoning which seem incredibly difficult to support based on that reasoning alone. See the OP’s part about Mises on price controls—no purely praxeological account can determine that price controls will cause non-price rationing. So the criticism is that Austrians do not actually practice what they preach, largely because if they did so they would have very little to say about the real world.
I’d point out a couple problems here:
Firstly, “controlled experiments” is simply an ideal which is no more achieved in the physical sciences than in the social ones. The various experimental methods employed by scientists differ only in the degree to which they’re uncontrolled. Popperian falsifiability has been criticized in all scientific contexts for these reasons. I believe that Quine’s discussions of this issue are the best-known… suffice to say, the Austrians need to come up with a better reason for dismissing the scientific method as applied to economics versus the scientific method as applied to other disciplines—but alas, this would probably require them to wade into the kind of messy empirical issues which they seem to abhor.
Secondly, even if scientific knowledge of economic phenomena could be rejected for the above reasons, the fact is that Austrian economists still routinely make empirical predictions based on praxeological reasoning which seem incredibly difficult to support based on that reasoning alone. See the OP’s part about Mises on price controls—no purely praxeological account can determine that price controls will cause non-price rationing. So the criticism is that Austrians do not actually practice what they preach, largely because if they did so they would have very little to say about the real world.