Human action is a work of pseudoscience through chapter 15, and after 15 is fully integrated into mainstream economics. So it is not useful. Mises failed to discern that economics, like physics and mathematics was subject to an epistemic requirement for operational definitions. And while he intuited something close to correct, he was unable to solve it, and first cast praxeology as a ‘science’ without reliance upon the scientific method – which by itself is a definition of a pseudoscience, and second, stated that all of economics was deducible from the first principle of human action. Also demonstrably false, and solidifying his work as pseudoscientific. The correct answer in operational terms is that if any empirical observation in economics cannot be reduced to a sequence of rational human actions, then it cannot in fact be ‘true’. The first 15 chapters are an elaborate attempt to justify his fallacy. Man economy and state ignores, and like all of Rothbard’s works, intentionally attempts to undermine the western competitive cultural advantage that northern europeans, by virtue of constructing the only high trust society, are the only people on earth capable of constructing commons. So, this book is actually half correct – bureaucracy leads to despotism. And half deception: that does not mean that the organized construction of commons and the prevention of free riding upon or consumption of those commons is not a strategic competitive advantage, or that commons cannot be produced through alternative means. It is an elaborate fallacy on the scale, if not quality, of Freud’s psychology, Marx’s Capital, Cantor’s sets and Mises’ Praxeology.
The Constitution of liberty is an historical and scholarly work demonstrating that the only known means of preserving freedom is through a constitution of private property rights and the organic evolution of the common law. Hayek’s failure in his work, was his reliance on what was know in his day, and his insufficient emphasis on the scope of property rights, original intent, and strict construction, nor the institutional means of maintaining those three constraints. Unfortunately for all three authors, computer science would rescue the world from platonism, where logic, math, science, and economics had failed: the existence proof, and our ability to promise that we make true statements.
Of these three the only book of value is the Constitution of Liberty. The rest is simply
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev Ukraine