Praxeology

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.

They are not in fact proposing less intrusive government nudges to replace more intrusive government coercion, but yet still more government on top of what we have today.

The Misesian approach to economics does not rely on unrealistic formal models.

Mises's great insight was that economic reasoning has its foundation in just this understanding of action; and that the status of economics as a sort of applied logic derives from the status of the action-axiom as an a priori-true synthetic proposition.