Praxeology

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.

We must make them realize what they owe to the much vilified "economic freedom," the system of free enterprise and capitalism.

From the standpoint of both politics and history, this proof [of the "impossibility" of socialist planning] is certainly the most important discovery by economic theory.

One of the most important principles of economics is that decisions are made at the margin, and one of the key problems in classical economics concerned the source of value.

The Austrian school is the only school of thought built on a solid foundation. The Austrian school's a priori knowledge is apodictically true, and not subject to time or place.

Economics is not about goods and services; it is about the actions of living men.

Praxeology - economics - provides no ultimate ethical judgments: it simply furnishes the indispensable data necessary to make such judgments. Common criticisms of the free market are refuted praxeologically in this chapter. Absolute equality is an impossible goal.

Human action is defined simply as purposeful behavior. Men act by virtue of their being human. Action can be undertaken only by individual actors. Leisure is a good. Mises derives economic law from this axiom that the study of man is the concept of action.

Recorded at Mises University 2008.