Author: Curt Doolittle

http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Human-Action-by-Ludwig-von-Mises-considered-a-great-book/answer/Curt-Doolittle?srid=u4Qv&share=1WHY HUMAN ACTION IS NOT A GREAT BOOK

It isnt.

Through at least Chapter 15 it is a work of pseudoscientific philosophy, and from 15 onward is adequate. Mises’ reputation like that of most jewish authors has been the subject of extravagant but unworthy promotion by jewish libertarians and a small number of third tier academics who attempt to sway the unsophisticated with arguments that are ideological useful but scientifically widely if not universally rejected.

The Austrian Christian movement has been fully integrated into classical economics, except for the open debate over the impact of policy on the business cycle. The Austrian jewish movement consisting of mises and rothbard, and to some lesser degree Hoppe, is widely considered a heresy or cult movement, and the mainstream has sought to distance itself from this rationalist and pseudoscientific fringe.

Prolific authors with activist supporters have spread mises work as a mainstream alternative, to a population more able to grasp simplistic arguments rather that the heavily mathematical language of economics.

Mises, like many of his contemporaries, correctly intuited that something was wrong with the direction if economic inquiry, but he, even less so than his peers in math and science, was unsuccessful in identifying it. And instead resorted, like freud, cantor, marx, to elaborate verbal pseudoscientific argument, unsupported by empirical evidence, to justify his preconceptions of how economics ought to work if it worked for the benefit of investors rather than the benefit of the commons (everyone).

Mises constructs a model whereby we pay absolutely nothing for the maintenance of the commons. He applies the ethic of the ghetto. The commons is taken for granted – unpaid for and uncared for. And if there is a commons, he wants us to free-rid upon it, justifiably rather than pay for it. Which makes sense if you’re a culture of migratory pastoralists, but not if you’re a culture of landed agrarians and industrialists who treat the land and the commons as sanctified.

In other words, Human Action is a justification of free riding on the commons. It’s a justification for immorality. A justification for theft. By a man who is either ignorant of, or hateful of, mankind so much that he would devote this amount of work to yet another pseudoscientific act of deception. Not on the scale of Marx or Freud, but only because he had a smaller market for his ideas.

Yes, the state bureaucracy is predatory, but that does not mean we abandon all commons’, it means we abandon the bureaucracy.

This is the correct interpretation of Mises: as an advocate for investors who used pseudoscience to justify his preconceptions.

Economists don’t read Marx nor Mises except as literary diversions. If you do read Mises, read him as an author of cosmopolitan middle class pseudoscience the same way you read Marx as lower class pseudoscience, or Strauss as upper class pseudoscience.

But we appear to be coming to the end of a century and a half of pseudoscience – thanks to science. Particularly science since 2000.