4. The Position of Money among Economic Goods
Karl* Knies has recommended to replace the traditional division of economic goods into consumer goods and producer goods with a threefold classification: producer goods, consumer goods, and means of exchange.
3. Epistemological Relativism in the Sciences of Human Action
Up to the eighteenth century, historians paid little or no attention to the epistemological problems of their craft.
2. The Treatment of “Irrationality” in the Social Sciences
One of the manifestations of the present-day “revolt against reason” is the tendency to find fault with the social sciences for being purely rational. Life and reality, say the critics, are irrational; it is quite wrong to deal with them as if they were rational and open to interpretation by reasoning.
Matthew Feeney writes on the Cato Institute blog about taxi deregulation. As expected, Feeney comes out in favor of (some) deregulation but also, which should perhaps be equally expected, manages to completely undermine the case for the market.
1. Social Science and Natural Science
The foundations of the modern social sciences were laid in the eighteenth century. Up to this time we find history only.
Method
Introduction by Richard Ebeling
In the 1920s and the 1930s, Ludwig von Mises was recognized as one of the leading economic theorists on the European Continent.1 F. A. Hayek has said that Mises’s critique of the possibilities for economic calculation under socialism had “the most profound impression on my generation. ... To none of us ...
Foreword by Margit von Mises
When my husband died in 1973 I had to go through his papers. Some of them were still in manuscript form and had never before been published. I selected several of these, plus a number of other articles that had appeared in periodicals but were no longer in print. This book is the result.
At my request Richard Ebeling wrote an introduction which he has done in great detail. The depth of Ebeling’s understanding of my husband’s work is certainly apparent in his writing.
I am pleased to have the Ludwig von Mises Institute present this volume to the public.
Comparative Economic Systems
13. Capitalism versus Socialism
Most of our contemporaries are highly critical of what they call “the unequal distribution of wealth.” As they see it, justice would require a state of affairs under which nobody enjoys what are to be considered superfluous luxuries as long as other people lack things necessary for the preservation of life, health, and cheerfulness. The ideal condition of mankind, they pretend, would be an equal distribution of all consumers’ goods available.
