Praxeology

Recorded at Mises University 2007.

There are two main branches of the sciences of human action: praxeology and history.

The essence of the phenomenon of interest is the cost that a lender or an investor endures. This cost stems from the fact that the lender or the investor has given up some present benefit.

Two of my favorite pieces are Rothbard’s In Defense of “Extreme Apriorism” an

This is a fascinating review of Rothb

War is the outcome of class conflict inherent in the political relationship — the relationship between ruler and ruled, parasite and producer, tax-consumer and taxpayer.

Mises demonstrated that capitalism is an economic system rationally planned by the combined, self-interested efforts of all who participate in it. The failure of socialism, he showed, results from the fact that it represents not economic planning, but the destruction of economic planning, which exists only under capitalism and the price system.

"His outstanding moral quality was moral courage, the ability to stand alone, and an almost fanatical intellectual honesty and candor that refused to deviate or compromise an inch."

But it should be clear that what distinguishes libertarianism from all competing political theories is its scrupulous adherence — informed by sound, i.e., Austrian, economics — to the idea that property rights in scarce resources must be assigned to the person with the best, objective link to the resource in question; and that, in the case of bodies, the link is the natural connection to and relationship between the occupant and the body, while for all other resources, the objective link is first use.

Recorded at Mises University 2006.