I am not sure whether to respond to Pat's question on this
list or off, since it seems to drift toward personal
evaluations of Mises' method. For the moment I'll hope for
some HES content and stay here.
First of all, Pat must know by now that I think he is vastly
overstating the difference between humans and other animals.
If he thinks animals do not do cost-benefit analysis, he
must never have owned a pet or watched nature shows.
If he thinks that humans do not blindly obey authority, then
he has not read Milgram's experiment and must have trouble
understanding basic military training.
Of course animals do not form markets, build complex
machines, or write sonnets. (Neither do most humans ... )
But as with humans, we often find in useful to explain their
actions as resulting from intentional goal satisfaction
without worrying much about how scientifically suspect (as
Veblen pointed out) this makes our explanations.
Second, the distinction between economic policy and social
policy seems blurry to me, while Pat seems to see a bright
line.
To take just one example, is universal free education
a social policy or an economic policy? Can Mises' method
help us determine how many years of government funded
education should be available to children (0? 6? 12? 16?),
much less what curriculum design should be chosen? In my
view this is a hugely important question---most productive
capital is human capital---that Mises cannot much help us
with, even when we agree on the goals.
Of course, those working on this issue can expect to spend
a lot of time discussing goals...
I understand the question raised by Pat to be something like
this: "Does Mises provide the right method for evaluating
economic policy proposals?" To cut short a long discussion,
as far as I have understood him, Mises should be seen as
offering a method for critique, and while the critiques that
emerge from his method should not be ignored they need not
be definitive. Of course I am a fairly casual Mises reader.
Cheers,
Alan Isaac
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