Philosophy and Methodology

In a few short hours, I was assaulted ten times with the demand that I display social consciousness.

At this point it no doubt seems like economists are the wet blankets of the world, but one of the most important implications of careful economic reasoning is that often, your schemes and programs will not just be ineffective, they will be positively destructive.

"There is a great need for an introductory economics text that begins with the fundamentals of human action, develops economic principles in a way that students can understand, and then applies these principles to economic policy."

No one would suggest that Marx was consciously dishonest, but a very great deal of intellectual disingenuousness has gone to the explaining (and the explaining away) of Marx. Accordingly, all things considered, I do not like the company of Marx.

Even Marx did not contest the fact that private initiative and private ownership of the means of production were indispensable stages in the progre

Above all, central planning allows a few who are the new elite to seek to control the total lives of the masses. It is this gigantic object lesson which brings the intellectual issues into focus.

Men do well under a plan and its controls if the Gestalt to be accomplished makes sense, is not too distant, and offers rewards as well as challenges for different levels of skill. But this is quite different from a superimposed, infallible political philosophy which would urge on us an engineered society.

We've all encountered the rival theories Hunt is talking about here — the thinkers like Max Weber, who believed that the rise of liberalism was caused by the Puritan work ethic, the thinkers who believe that the rise of liberalism was made inevitable by Christian ideas about the individual soul, and so forth.When you're attempting to explain market processes, whether in the marketplace for goods and services or the marketplace of ideas, it's never that simple.

Economics is about human choice and action. The praxeological concept of time is not the concept of physics or biology.

In the long run, the religious "peace" of absolutist "moderation" turned out to be the peace of the grave for many Huguenots.