David Glasner doesn't seem to accept that accounting identities are tautologies that determine what is logically necessary in that system of expression. They are true by definition (rule). That which contradicts a tautology by violating a definition (rule) is logically impossible.
Tautology and contradiction are formal boundary conditions of expression — unless one is writing nonsense like Lewis Carroll, who happened to be a logician and mathematician in addition to being a very clever writer. He is best known for writing nonsense verse — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which continue to delight children and adults alike.
Mathematics is the language of science, and accounting is the language of business. In so far as economic is a study of production, distribution and consumption, in a modern economy this involves business and is conducted in terms of business rules, institutional arrangements in which double entry bookkeeping and accounting procedure (rules) are foundational.
Does anyone actually question this? How could accounting identities that follow from the institutional arrangements (rules) not be foundational as constraints (boundary conditions)? Otherwise, it's possible to just make stuff up.
Let's be clear. In a modern monetary economy, accounting identities are the starting point of doing economics. Period. Anyone who doesn't get this and hew to it is not playing by the rules, which amounts to talking nonsense.
