RUINING AN AUSTRIAN’S DAY
“Man must act” is of course, true, but it is an incomplete sentence. “Man must act to serve his interests” is the full sentence. And completing the sentence demonstrates it’s irrelevance. The meaningful problem is that “Man must voluntarily cooperate.” And that is where the problem becomes difficult. Because man must actually “calculate and choose to outwit the current course of events”.
We call Reductio ad absurdum arguments rhetorical fallacies for a reason. ANy act of simplification or categorization is necessarily eliminative. ”
One must be careful not to eliminate the causal properties of that which is required for later deduction from first principles.
It’s a cute trick of obscurant logic. And the genius is in constructing the (false) obscurant logic. Not in what we can deduce from it.
Human cooperation requires the voluntary payment of vast opportunity costs, for which they expect something in return. No activity is conducted for altruistic reasons. All activity is conducted in exchange for something. Most of it for insurance on inclusion in future opportunity.
Which Mises ignores and Rothbard intentionally avoids.
It’s possible to fix Mises’ Praxeology and Rothbard’s ethics, but only by restoring the recognition of those costs, and the consequential impact those costs have on the program of ethics we libertarians rely upon.
Fixing those errors then, returns LIBERTY TO ARISTOCRACY, truth and clarity, and rescues it from the ghetto of obscurant, deceptive language meant intentionally to mislead.