Each of us wants the ability to better our condition through substituting one bond with another that we believe to be of greater value (divorcing in order to marry a more considerate spouse, switching holdings in a securities portfolio, changing jobs, placing our children in a better school).
Murray Rothbard's two volumes are a monument of 20th-century scholarship.
It comes down to the question of which is more fundamental to the Marxist worldview: its polylogism or its exploitation theory. A major job of the Hoppean project is to toss out the former while retaining a version of the latter in a way that can be used against the state and its interests.
Although Mises's books were often criticized severely when they appeared, his analyses of market operations, money, inflation, government intervention, and Communism, all firmly based on human action principles, live on and are gaining increasingly serious attention from scholars.
"Mises must be compared to thinkers like Voltaire or Montesquieu, Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill."
Fortunately, Austrian economists have shown that every product and service can be offered privately, without the use of monopoly force through government.
The We cannot act otherwise than each of them acting on his own behalf.
Mises was the first scholar to recognize that economics is part of a larger science in human action, a science that Mises called "praxeology."
Rothbard has been proven correct. Mathematical modeling has revealed itself to be a vain and formalistic exercise incapable of explaining the international currency crises, stock-market and real-estate bubbles, or the global financial crises that have racked our world in the past two decades.
