Philosophy and Methodology

Presenting "saving lives" as a more or less equal alternative to commerce and community is a misguided view of what the lockdown debate is really all about.

Buyers and sellers in the free market do indeed act from self-interest, but Adam Smith never argued that this excludes friendly feelings for those they do business with.

Presenting "saving lives" as a more or less equal alternative to commerce and community is a misguided view of what the lockdown debate is really all about.

We've reached the end of Human Action! Tom Woods joins the podcast to discuss Part Seven, "The Place of Economics in Society," and it's a show you don't want to miss. 

It isn’t a good argument against Austrian economics that someone might come up with a science that made better predictions. You have to show us the science, so that it can be compared with praxeology. Suffice it to say that this hasn’t been done.

Human beings do not exist to be pawns in a game of lockdowns and collective action.

Thomas Kuhn influenced Rothbard by demolishing the notion that the history of science is one of continual progress. The truth is that once a paradigm becomes established, its basic tenets are not questioned at all until major problems crop up.

GDP is fine for counting things like washing machines. But it is quite useless for counting other basic indicators of the quality of life.

Some argue that praxeology's deductions should be formalized using mathematical logic, but such an approach would be inappropriate for human action, whose axioms are known.

GDP is fine for counting things like washing machines. But it is quite useless for counting other basic indicators of the quality of life.