 This is Mises Weekends with your host, Jeff Deist. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Once again to Mises Weekends, we've got a really interesting topic this week that appeals to me enormously. We've also got a great guest, his name's Michael Watson. He is a former summer fellow here at the Mises Institute. He's presented a couple of different times at our research conferences. He is a PhD candidate at George Mason University and professor of economics at Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina. He's finishing up his PhD. So Michael, thank you for joining us. Great to see you. Thank you. The topic, ladies and gentlemen, is what lies outside of economics. This relates to a paper Michael just delivered about a week ago at our research conference last weekend where he was talking about some things like Thomistic personalism, which is a form of Catholic thought and applying this to economics and to prexiology and to necessity and thought. So I thought that we would broaden this a little bit and talk about what sort of actions we ought to think of as economic and what we ought to think of otherwise. So that said, Michael, let's start. I know this is a huge topic, but let's start with Mises presents this idea of prexiology that humans act. They have a means and mindset, but he also defined economics as a subset of prexiology. So in that sense, Mises appears to be thinking that there's human action that takes place outside of economics per se. So we need a definition of economics and economics we usually talk about at least in Austrian school, catalactics that is exchange, market exchange and barter. So buying and selling. But then there's also another part of prexiology. We can talk about the gifts or we can talk about violence. Mises talks about autistic action that is unilateral action. There's no bilateral. There's no buying and selling. So if I take my fists and I punch you, that's violence, that's an autistic, quote unquote option, a unilateral action. He would say that's within prexiology. My end is to harm you, whatever the, maybe it's some, I want to rob you or I want to get the enjoyment out of beating someone up. So I take my fists, I hit you and the means is the fist, throwing my fist and that time that I used to inflict that violence. But there's also the opposite, giving someone something. So I, one can imagine a situation where someone's unconscious. They don't have the ability to say no. And you help them, someone in a coma. We are gifting our resources to maintain that person, that person is an end. And we could talk about persons as means or persons as ends. We treat a person as a means we can treat them as a slave or some type of property. We could, or we could treat a person as an end. And we treat a person as an end when we, when they're good is our end. We, their wellbeing is our end. And so we help them, whether they're in a coma, they're unconscious, something of that sort or perhaps a beggar who is, or someone who's starving, you give them food and they accept that food. The other thing to consider as well is when we buy and sell, we're not treating each other as means. We're actually helping each other to achieve our separate ends, right? It's so, some people who are very concerned about ethics and morals, they see the market and they see people using each other as means. And it's, but it's, there's a, the voluntary relationship there is that you have different ends. You have your family. You want to take care of I have my family. I don't have a family yet, but some someday I will. I have my family out. I'm going to want to take care of and you, I have $5 and you have the apple. I buy the, I say to give you $5, I get the apple or apples go to support me and my family and the $5 goes to you and to achieve whatever energy you need to achieve. So the market is the means of which we are able to pursue our ends in a voluntary manner. And also it allows us to maximize the ends of which we're willing to achieve. Well, but I just want to clarify with you a couple of things. First, Mises sees means and ends as a rational decision, not as having a moral or ethical component, at least as regards prexiology and economics itself. And second, you know, how are we think about altruism then about gifts about supposedly selfless action. We think of them as occurring generally within economic action or generally without outside of economic action. So regarding altruism in economic action and outside Mises has a quote in this in human action where he talks about a business owner hires his buddy and pays them more than his productivity level. That margin above the productivity level is a gift. That's what he says it is, it's a gift. It's not, the business owner's taking a loss. He's engaging it in consumption, which is the technical term we use in economics which a lot of folks care about ethics freak out about but it's just a technical term. It's a formal term, you know, it's some, so he does talk about that. Another thing about means and ends, yes. So means and ends also seems rationality that we can are able to understand cause and effect that we can reason about what means will achieve which ends. Of course, Mises also talks about the ultimate end as well, but he doesn't define that. He defines the ultimate. He calls it happiness, satisfaction, contentment, whatever formal term you want to use, the praxeology doesn't talk about what is the ultimate end of human beings, right? He, it's all about the means and ends framework. Praxis, action, it's not about how should our ends be? What hierarchy of ends is moral and proper? What is the ultimate end? That's ethics, metaphysics and things like that. Well, I think what gets confusing for people here is sometimes is that Mises insistence that economics per se is a value free science. It's concerned with looking at catalactics and means ends comparisons, but that of course, the average person knows that all human action is imbued with moral and ethical questions. We can never completely separate them, but conceptually it's important to separate them in terms of studying in an academic discipline, in terms of science. Yes, so the way I handle this often is I say we start with our priority truth or the axiom, whatever you want to call it, of action. Action implies choice, choice implies scarcity. Is that value neutral? Is that true? And then scarcity implies law of returns, that there's an optimal output if we hold all variables constant and just change one of the input variables. And so I bring that up with folks and folks who are usually opposed to Austrian economics will say, okay, I agree with that. Okay, so that's the first step to make. So at some point, praxeology needs to be integrated with ethics, but we can do logic without necessarily considering the ethical or the ideological, because Austrian economics doesn't have to be integrated. It can be integrated with libertarianism, conservatism, all sorts. You can be a socialist and a praxeologist. It just probably would mean that you think the ideal society is that of the tribe or some super primitive economy where we have no wealth. Well, so let's apply this thinking to something that all human beings are concerned about, which is relationships, whether that be dating or marriage or parenting or even just friendships. What would Mises say about these kind of relationships and contrast that maybe with what Thomas Aquinas would say about personal relationships from a Catholic perspective? Can the two meet in the middle in any way or are they just a separate way of looking at the world? So I think it's more about compatibility. What Mises does throughout human action, throughout his writings, he assumes, he takes as given things that human beings seem to all want, peace, prosperity, et cetera. And he says, okay, I'm not gonna talk about whether those things actually should or should not be taken as a good society. I'm just gonna assume that what Aquinas does, of course, he gives us an ultimate end, supreme happiness, face-to-face vision with God. But when we go further into that, the highest virtue for Aquinas is agonist love, that is tree, doing good into the other. And so if we want to talk about Mises and Aquinas, I think where Mises leaves a empty formalism, formal term of ultimate end, we can take Aquinas and put them in there. We can also talk about Aquinas and Praxeology does give us a way to think about the gifts as well. And so we can have the situation in relationships where husband and wife, the husband and wife want to achieve the good for each other. And so you, but that actually means you have to choose ends. Like, what does well-being mean for the other person? What means do I use to achieve their well-being? And vice versa. In a sense, there's a bit of entrepreneurial activity where you have to actually speculate and say what would be good for this person and how will they react to it? Someone who's in a coma, it's pretty simple. You give them nutrition and hope they wake up, right? Someone who's lying in a ditch, it's pretty clear, pick them up, bring them to the end. Someone who's active and also a conscious actor, you actually have to think about how they interpret the thing you're giving them or the gift, so which can result in asymmetric interpretation. You can have the situation, different cuts, two people from two different cultures meet each other. Maybe the guy gives a gift, one person gives a gift and that gift is understood to be completely heinous. So there is that subjectivity component that's very important in praxeology. We do, we understand the world through the way we've been raised and all the ideologies and ideas that we've learned and we apply it to understand which ends are appropriate in given situations. And so sure we want to give a gift. We want to act lovingly. We want to give the other person their due. However, we actually have to interpret that. We have to understand what is their good and how will they interpret that? Well, I like what you said earlier, which is that any sort of ideological worldview could adopt Austrian economics in terms of just viewing means and ends and understanding the relationship between them, but I wanna go a little farther here on Aquinas, a lot of religious folks don't much like free market economics. In other words, they say that religion, especially Christianity, naturally presupposes a degree of caring about our fellow man that somehow this ultra-rationalist economics shuns to the side and that G. Wiz, Michael, really hardcore Austrian or free market economics is not all that compatible with Christianity. So give us your thoughts on this, give us a rebuttal. So my way of handling this isn't going, a lot of economists will go and see economics produces massive prosperity, but it's a dynamic economy which can result in instability for families and that's not good. So what I prefer to do is actually, let's start from the beginning. Let's go to the foundations of praxeology, the foundations of Thomism for the Catholics, for the Christians who like Thomism or even the agnostics and atheists who like realism because Thomism is also known as realism. So let's talk about what are the elements of human action into Aquinas? What are the elements of praxeology? What we see is rationality, rationality is in both. That is reason, ability to understand cause and effect to use means to achieve ends. We also talk about free will. Free will is also both in praxeology and Aquinas. We have for Aquinas, Aquinas usually talks about free will in terms of we live in a world of particulars. And this is also high, this is praxeology is high. We live in a world where we have, when we have to choose particular ends and we have to use particular means. And so we have choice about what hierarchy of ends and what means we will achieve to use those ends. Of course there's not so much free will regarding the ultimate end that we're always trying to alleviate uneasiness. As particular finite beings, we're always in a state of uneasiness. We're always, non-action is not really a choice. Teleological, human action in praxeology is teleological. So there's a telos, there's an ultimate end and we are all driven toward that ultimate end. Oh, what else? Oh, it's non-satiation, we can never be satiated in all our desires. We cannot achieve all the ends we wish to achieve. We're in constant pursuit of ends and we're in constant pursuit of that ultimate end happiness. Both in Aquinas and both in Mises. Transitivity, okay, so transitivity is the idea. I prefer A to B, I prefer B to C, therefore I prefer A to C. Mises dismisses that idea of transitivity which most neoclassical mainstream microeconomists use as the fact that action takes place through time. We have many, we don't make all our actions at once. We go through time. Aquinas deals attacks transitivity by saying we live in a world of uncertainty. That's Rothbard, that's Mises. Same thing, we are uncertain about the future. And the other thing to consider is that Rothbard, he conserves himself a realist or a thomist. You can see his article that's article on extreme a priorism. Another great economist, not economist, he's a philosopher, he's the president of the Action Institute, Gabriel Zamotti, Action Institute in Argentina. He has all these articles in Spanish after we learned Spanish to read those articles, but there's so many English that you can access where he discusses how thomism and praxeology can be combined. And I'm really building off that work in that paper. I mean, that's 50 pages right now. It's probably gonna be three or four articles. I have to somehow split it up, but I'm going at the foundations. Are the foundations compatible? And where I see is not the, not are they only compatible, they're complementary or they're even identical. And so then we can ask, don't the really the only place where they're not identical is that ultimate end. What is happiness? What is the good of which we're in pursuit? But Mises is something very simple. He says, that's not praxeology doesn't tell us what the ultimate end is, Aquinas does. And so we just take it and fill it, fill it in that formal placeholder. Right, so to understand this very sort of thin definition of happiness that Mises proposes, you talk about his quote from human action. We call a man happy who has succeeded in attaining his end. So that's pretty thin. In other words, a crack addict may say, I really want to get high and go obtain some crack and get high, but they have probably haven't done themselves any favors in the long run. So that's sort of outside the Misesian paradigm. But so I want to expand upon this idea of rationality, that there's some connection between means and ends. It actually works. Even Austrians aren't, don't fully accept this, the idea, call it Mill's idea of Homo economicus. In other words, there's bounded rationality. We have limited knowledge at our fingertips, even with computers. And so not only is morality perhaps outside of Mises's analysis, but also perfect knowledge. We don't always have all the information to make perfectly rational means and calculations. And we don't have perfect knowledge. We don't know what's gonna happen in the future. We don't know what people's, we don't even know what our future preferences are gonna be. I don't know what your future preferences are gonna be. And I don't know what the heck's gonna happen in the world in the future, because we don't have that. There's all sorts of asymmetries in the world, which of course entrepreneurship is supposed to deal with. Every asymmetry is a profit opportunity in some way. You can get the property rights, right? So Rothbard, yes, Rothbard defines in man accounting and say, psychology, ethics, praxeology history, right? And one of the definitions he gives for ethics is how we arrange our ends. How should we should arrange our ends, right? What ends should we achieve in and how should arrange them? Of course also the relationship between me, which means would also be proper to those ends. I would add that as well. And so as long as the foundations of human action between two ethical theories are the same, which I think what you have in Aquinas and Mises, you can get to integrating them and synthesizing them. And so it won't just be some, you don't just have to be utilitarian to be an Austrian economist. You don't have to buy into, say, Rothbard's natural law to be an Austrian economist. You can be a conservative, you can be from all these different backgrounds, and you can use Austrian economics. I mean, what's one of the best examples of Austrian economics applied? It's Ordo Liberalism, Bill Humrupke. I read Bill Humrupke, and I'm thinking, I don't agree all the time with what he actually, everything in a humane economy, but in general, I prefer that than what we have now. And so if Austrian economics can be more influential, I see that as a step in the right direction. As for homoeconomics, that's very true. Austrian economics does not need the homoeconomics. We don't need the assumption that human beings are trying to maximize pleasure or maximize profit. That's totally not required because profit and loss determine what survives and what doesn't. The profit just rewards productivity. Losses reward on productivity is more of an evolutionary situation. The term that so where Christians or folks who are very concerned about morals and ethics go wrong is when they assume that we assume all behavior has to be selfish and profit maximizing. That's not a requirement. And Mises does in Robert talks about that, but it seems that those quotes go often unrecognized. The other thing to remember is that Austrian economists of themselves have come from different foundational backgrounds. So you have Manger, Morris, Erzateeling with Brantano, Mises, Conte and utilitarian Rothbard, Realist and Natural Law. And so there's that variety, which a lot of folks who look at Austrian economics don't even recognize. They think we're all utilitarians and we're all the homoeconomics. Well, I wanna talk about the realm of human action that's not necessarily voluntary or is even forced. And I'm thinking, let's say warfare when the marketplace breaks down and I'm thinking in terms of slavery, give us how can praxeology approach involuntary human action and what would Aquinas have to say about it? So let's do slavery. Slavery, you have a property in someone else. Property are what means. Use property to achieve ends. So human beings are trying to achieve ends. So when you treat a human being as a slave and human beings have free will and then we can act and we choose ends, we're not treating the human person as what they are. We're forcing them to do things that we want them to do. So on slavery, that issue that we're treating someone as property when they themselves have, in a sense, they're their own property in some way. When we treat a person as a means, we misunderstand the nature of that person. Every person is an ends and up themselves. And so we have to have, then that's what, so property should serve people. People should not be property required to serve others. In terms of war, I'm not sure if I can go there. So you'd be talking more about the issues with the draft. Well, the idea is that war isn't humans interacting voluntarily, it's more akin to the fisticuffs you alluded to earlier in our conversation. It's aggression. Yeah, so also there's not much market exchange in the military. There's a command and order and there's an end you want to achieve. The end is not, and also the profit loss mechanism doesn't necessarily apply in the same way. Military wants to defeat its enemy per se or defeat a country or get, grab some land. That's its end. And it's going to use the resources of the economy as its means to do that and people's means to do that. So it's a completely different way. It's not the market. It's much more closer to autistic action. I haven't thought this question out through it really enough. But it's, yeah, it's more command control. It's not spontaneous order. It's one of the most more essentially planned situations. And perhaps, I'll admit there are probably some situations where we may want to engage in that, say if you're being invaded by the Nazis, you probably want to engage in a war. Well, the fact that this is all so complex and that logic and philosophy and economics are so interrelated, I think shows that Mises was on the right path in writing a book as broad and sweeping as human action. But I think it also shows that there's not too many economists who are necessarily equipped to do that themselves. So that said, Michael, thank you again for your time. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.