Calculation and Knowledge

Man chooses ultimate ends first and then the means to attain them.

Choosing means is a matter of reason, choosing ultimate ends a matter of the soul and the will.

"The necessary result of the adoption of this empiricist epistemological and methodological model was that social scientists would always be behind the curve of any emerging social phenomenon."

The beginning of a new credit expansion runs across remainders of preceding malinvestment and malemployment, not yet obliterated in the course of t

The drop in interest rates makes unrealizable projects appear profitable and realizable. Entrepreneurs embark upon the execution of such projects.

It is a favorite conceit of modern, 20th-century liberals that skepticism, the attitude that nothing can really be known as the truth, is the best

But the centrality of the knowledge-corrective character of the market process for both Mises and Hayek cannot seriously be doubted. Whatever the differences between a Hayekian articulation of the market process and a Misesian articulation, the centrality of the notion of the corrective process for both, is the crucially important circumstance.

Competition is a process of the formation of opinion: by spreading information, it creates that unity and coherence of the economic system which we presuppose when we think of it as one market.

Hence, it is scientifically meaningless to say that the "probability of Jerry Ford being elected in 1976 is three-eighths," since elections are not homogeneous events repeated a large number of times. And yet a large amount of modern social science and of its mathematizing rests on this faulty view of probability theory.

"The state has only one role in the novels and it is entirely negative: it makes and enforces the fugitive slave laws."