John, the materials in the history of economic thought, like Mises's Human Action, have been written by human beings with goals and with views about ways of achieving them. They are not the consequence of the random typings of an infinite number of child-like monkeys. As I see it, there is no way to "understand" these materials without trying to understand those goals and views. In my view, the foundation of Mises's Human Action is his definition of economics. Here is his introductory paragraph: "Economics is the youngest of all sciences. In the last two hundred years, it is true, many new sciences have emerged from the disciplines familiar to the ancient Greeks. However, what happened here was merely that parts of knowledge which had already found their place in the complex of the old system of learning now became autonomous. The field of study was more nicely subdivided and treated with new methods; hitherto unnoticed provinces were discovered in it, and people began to see things from aspects different from those of their precursors. The field itself was not expanded. But economics opened to human science a domain previously inaccessible and never thought of. The discovery of a regularity in the sequence and interdependence of market phenomena went beyond the limits of the traditional system of learning. It conveyed knowledge which could be regarded neither as logic, mathematics, psychology, physics, nor biology." You have decided to criticize Mises but you are unwilling to discuss his definition of economics. So I must return to my original thesis that you deliberately aimed to bash Mises. At this stage, I must take this thesis as demonstrated by your unwillingness to approach Mises's writings about the a priori, the logical structure of the human mind, etc. in the only way that could enable you to understand them. In my view, a failure to approach the work of Mises -- or of any other economist, for that matter -- by trying to understand the goals and perceived means of the writer -- represents an approach to the history of economic thought that has no reasonable defense. You might learn something about what I regard as the proper way to approach Mises's work by reading Bruce Caldwell's BEYOND POSITIVE ECONOMICS, although, as I argued many years ago, I do not regard this book as having successfully achieved its goal. Pat Gunning