I love it when positivists or more specifically absolutists grab hold of the empirical method and what big "T" truths might exist.
The expectation that economists have to explain "EVERYTHING" to be relevant towards "ANYTHING" is pretty defatigable. This is especially true when you bring in the tool of economists, which is statistics, which is a relevant sample, of a relevant population, giving a relative solution, to a falsifiable proposition (hypothesis).
In other words. In forcing a discipline into a box they've never claimed you injure the relevant position by a claim they've never made. A handy logical straw man or circumlocution.
I needn't remind this audience that empiricism is made up of many different schools of thought and have existed for much longer than the ad hominem of windowed time relating to recent political discourse. The Popper and Kuhn dichotomy means that science has just as many partisan ignominies as Fox and CNN do political pundits.
Regardless of the witchcraft that economists might use. The enlightened scientific philosopher will understand that empiricism and epistemology exist as holistic set of principles with the swinging tides of rational thought pulling upon each thread. The scientific method is many tools not just one.
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