 This is Jeff Deist and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to the Human Action Podcast. I want to take a moment to wish everyone a very, very happy 4th of July weekend. It's currently Friday, July 3rd. And, you know, we're very fortunate to live in this great country which has so much material abundance around us. And by great country, I do mean great. Obviously, we have a lousy and criminal federal government. We have a lousy and harmful and criminal Federal Reserve Central Bank. And we have a rueful empire and war machine. But all of that, given this is still a great country, we're still very lucky to have been born here and enjoy all the material and other wealth around us. So I want to just say that I hope that you have a great 4th of July weekend out there. And I hope that COVID doesn't ruin it for you. Now, if you've been listening along, you'll know that we have started. We have embarked on working our way through Murray Rothbard's famous treatise, Man, Economy and State. This is a big book, some 1100 odd pages, and, you know, it's a lot to choose. So we're going to make it a little easier for you by working through it. We had our initial show last week with my great friend, Patrick Newman, and we sort of discussed the background and history of the book, how it came to be. And I believe Dr. Newman made a good case for why lay audiences and lay readers just like you ought to tackle it, or at least parts of it. So I hope you'll consider it. I hope you'll work through it. And we have a code at the end of the show, which is going to allow you to get a discount on the book if you want to own it in physical form. And the edition we're using is called the Scholars Edition. It's the second edition, Man, Economy and State with Power and Market, which was an addendum of sorts to the book. Although originally intended to be part and parcel of it, you can find this at the Mises Institute website in our store and using the code HAPOD for Human Action Podcast. You get a discount off a beautiful hardcover, really nice. I believe it takes it from $25 to $20, and a very inexpensive softcover with tiny little type. But it's very easy to put in your briefcase, whatever. I encourage you to tackle this book just as I encouraged you to tackle Human Action. So this Scholars Edition starts with a really nice preface from Dr. Joe Celerno. And if you just read that, you're going to be really enthused to read the book itself because he goes into a lot of that sort of history of the Austrian school itself. And he's got some great tidbits in there because we're fortunate enough to have all of Murray Rothbard's personal papers, which were voluminous, as you can imagine. I mean, this guy had an absolutely crazy full apartment in New York City. And then later in life, he also had a home in Las Vegas when he was teaching at UNLV, where he unfortunately died far too young. He was still a professor there. And so we have all of his personal papers, archives. We're still going through them. There's tons of them. And we've actually produced a couple of books out of those with the help of Patrick Newman, both the Progressive Era and the Lost Fifth Volume of Conceived and Liberty. So Joe Celerno was relying on some of those notes and papers to write this intro. And the points he really makes is that the reasoning behind this book, which is written less than a decade after Human Action, is to present an updated treatise really in the Mangarian tradition, the tradition of Carl Manger, that this was designed to be a causal realist approach. This was going against in the 1950s and early 1960s, really going against the growing tide of positivism and empiricism, which was dominating academic economics in mid-century, mid-20th century, when Rothbard was writing this. So that was really his goal, was to push back and reassert the Mangarian tradition with this treatise. This was not, as a lot of people think, to write a heterodox book or to even write an Austrian book primarily. So in a sense this was not the radical Rothbard that many people came to think of him as later in his career. And I just want to point out, I'll let you guys read the preface, but there's a couple of incredible quotes that Dr. Celerno gives us from Mises himself that are really high praise for Rothbard. They're on a couple pages, but let me just read you one real quick. Mises characterizes this book as an apocal contribution to the general science of human action, praxeology, and it's practically most important and up to now best elaborated part economics. Henceforth, all essential studies in these branches of knowledge will have to take full account of the theories and criticisms expounded by Dr. Rothbard. So the reason I bring this up is obviously I'm a Rothbard fan and I want to defend his legacy, but also that Ludwig von Mises was not someone who gave praise readily. And I think sometimes Rothbard is attacked as not being fully messessy in his ultimate line of work and economic theory and his writings. So I think that's not true. I think they certainly had disagreements on the nature and role of the state, but I do think that in his economics output, Rothbard was very much in the messessy tradition and sometimes his critics claim otherwise. So I would just throw that out there. You can decide that for yourself. And the other thing that's interesting is that Joe points out that, Joe, I should say Dr. Salerno, points out that when Rothbard was writing this book, there are several places in it where he puts Austrian in quotes because there was a very different concept in the mid-1950s whether Austrian economics was even a thing or whether that was a useful moniker or helpful. And Mises himself was very dubious about that and so was Rothbard in the 50s. A lot of the good things, so to speak, about Austrian economics had been absorbed into the mainstream ideas like capital theory, origins of money, marginal utility, etc. So there was still in the 1950s very much a question whether the concept of Austrian economics as a school would continue, especially in America and across the West. So if you move ahead in the book to a very brief Rothbard preface which follows Dr. Salerno's introduction, you get some great insights because Rothbard wrote this in 1993, just a year or so before he died. And so you really get the latest Rothbard thinking on this. And in this great little preface he talks about the Austrian revival and really coalesced around a couple things. In 1974 there was a conference in South Royalton, Vermont where a lot of big luminaries' names showed up including Rothbard, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, a young Walter Block, a young Joe Salerno, a young Gary North, a young Richard Ebeling and some other luminaries and sort of really discussed whether Austrian economics should grow as a school, whether it should have its own identity. And this is, of course, coming on the heels of Hayek receiving the Nobel in 1974. So unfortunately, Mies is passed away in 72, so did not live to see or hear about the South Royalton Conference. You know, 40 years on, well, actually 50 years on, we have a lot more robust Austrian school. And Rothbard mentions that there's a lot more people working in the tradition, there's a lot more people employed at various universities, there are far more robust think tanks out there, plus we have the benefit of the Internet, which was just coming into being in 1993 when Rothbard wrote this, so we're able to spread at very low cost or free and instantaneously all kinds of books and articles and videos. So we're in a very different world today. So it's really interesting to get Rothbard's sort of view in the 1990s as to where things are. And one of the things I really like about his little preface is he laments a trend that was happening then which has only gotten worse, which is this idea of hyper-specialization in economics. I mean, today we have the most recent Nobel in econ being awarded to behavioral economists, which is really not a branch of economics. In my view, in the view of most Austrians, it's kind of pseudo psychology and it deals with motivations and that sort of thing, which we'll discuss as we go through chapter one of this book. So that motivations and psychology are not economics. They're related. They certainly applied to human action, but I think the distinctions are important. So things have only gotten worse. Nobody in the mainstream has written much in the way of treatises since the 60s when this book came out. So really the treatise is dead in the water. The most significant Austrian treatise of recent decades, I would argue, is Where to De Soto's Book on Money and Banking, which I believe first published in 2007 or 2008. So that's a treatise and he updates it regularly. So that's a money and banking treatise. That's not a full treatise dealing with all economics and harmonizing everything like man-economy and state attempts to do like human action attempted to do, but it's nonetheless a treatise. But apart from that, it's really hard for me to think of books since man-economy and state that we might consider treatises in economics. So that's an important distinction and Rothbard really laments it. He says, you know, economists used to be responsible for knowing economics, the essentials of the body of their discipline. The plain fact, I'm quoting Rothbard, the plain fact is that economics is fragmented precisely because it is no longer regarded as an edifice. Since it is considered a conjury of isolated splinters, it is treated as such. So now we have all these sort of little silos and subdivisions within economics and we don't have too many people studying it as an integrated whole. So I think that is, from our perspective anyway, a bad thing. So he continues his preface talking about human action and how that motivated him and he gives a nice little walk-through about what he attempted to do in this book. And what's great about it is you're getting the mind of Rothbard in the 90s. Several decades after he wrote the book when he's a more mature thinker, a more accomplished thinker. So I love that. And he does have a nice little nod to chapter 10 of this book, which as we will see really goes a long way towards upsetting the Missessian perspective on monopoly and creating a whole new school or thought with respect to monopoly as really something that can only exist as a grant of government privilege rather than something that arises naturally on the market. So interesting stuff in this preface and I think, again, it's worth reading simply because it's going to energize you and get you interested in reading the book itself. So for today's show, because I'm solo, again, it's Fourth of July weekend. I ask a lot of people to come on the podcast and it's heavy lifting. They got to go back and read a bunch of chapters. So today I am solo and so we are going to work our way through just chapter one, Fundamentals of Human Action. This is about 77 pages in the book. And honestly, if you just read this, you're going to know more about the underlying categories and concepts of economics than 99% of the population walking around out there. I know that I've said roughly the same thing about reading Henry Hazard's Economics in One Lesson, but this is the same. I mean, just this is such a foundational fundamental chapter. If you read this, you're going to be in good shape. Not a tough read, but I'm immediately struck by the fact it is a lot more textbooky than the opening chapter of Human Action because both men attempt to, in their opening chapter, sort of lay out what human action is, sort of give the case for why prexiology and action are foundational to the study of economics, which of course no other economics texts do. If you go to community college or something today, take Econ 101. You're going to get a textbook from probably Greg Mankiw or somebody like that. If you open it up to chapter one, they're not going to talk about human action. It's just going to immediately start into dopey stuff like supply and demand. Well, that's not dopey, but you know what I mean. Even though they both start with sort of the same idea, Rothbard reads far more like a textbook. You're struck with that from the beginning if you've read Human Action. And I hope you have. I hope you went through our early series of podcasts and made the effort. But Mises is much more a literary economist. When you read not only the first chapter, but the first part of Human Action, you are going to get a lot more, I don't know if flowery is the word for it, but a lot more studied prose. And again, this is a man for whom English is a second language. He's writing not in his native German. He actually wrote Human Action in English with the help of his wife, Margaret, and it's just a lot more flowery, a lot more conceptual, a lot more sprinkled with history and references to all kinds of ancient Rome. So it is very much what we might call literary economics. And in a sense, Mises was derided for being a literary economist in his day. He didn't have lots of charts and graphs and equations in his work. In fact, he didn't really have any. Whereas Rothbard right here in chapter one gets into some charts and graphs and equations. I mean, they're not complex, but he, you know, Murray Rothbard, people may not know, was an undergraduate math major and perfectly capable, as of course Mises was because Mises' brother Richard was a famous statistician at Harvard. But Murray Rothbard was perfectly capable mentally to put it mildly of handling the densest math or statistical work or econometrics that the profession could throw at him. So Murray Rothbard was not an Austrian because he eschewed math that was incapable of it. Let's get that out there. So in this first chapter, Fundamentals of Human Action, obviously it's a nod to Mises just by the name of the chapter. If you recall, and if you listened, I think the first show, the first podcast show we did on Human Action was with David Gordon to go through part one of Human Action because it is, I guess for lack of a better term, the more philosophical portion of Mises' great book. And so David's our philosophy expert. So normally we went to him. And so in that book, Mises introduces the idea of acting man. He introduces the concept of praxeology as the study of human action of which economics is a subset. He introduces the idea of purposefulness, for example. And he spends a lot of time in part one of Human Action talking about epistemological problems. How do we know what we know? How do we derive knowledge in economics or any other field of study? So that takes up a big part of that part. And so Mises basically says, in response to what's the proper epistemological approach, he says, well, we use human reason. We start with axioms. We deduce from them certain premises. And as long as the axiom itself, the starting point is correct. And as long as our logic is correct as we work through certain deductions, then our conclusions ought to be correct as well. So it's reasoning from premises to reach conclusions. So part one of Human Action is really all about praxeology, which is because we're studying humans and what they do, it calls for methodological individualism. We have to study people as individuals, not so much as groups and aggregates, which is almost a mania among statistical and empirical economists. Everybody wants to group people together and sort of treat them as data points as part of a greater whole. And if you accept Mises and Rothbard, that's not really the approach or the proper approach to economics. So chapter one is clearly a nod. Chapter one of man-economy and state. Sorry for going back and forth between the two books here, but it's important, I think, to do so, to link them. Chapter one of man-economy and state is clearly a nod to Mises, but it's also clearly a very different animal. You're going to read this. It's less flowery, and I guess less flowery is one way to put it, and more technical is another way to put it. Rothbard is giving us a text here, and he's laying it out in a very sort of foundational way without a lot of nonsense and without a lot of diversions. This is not like his later writings on all kinds of things when he would write about sports and theater and current events and Bill Clinton and all that sort of thing where you really got sort of the fun, punchy Rothbard with all kinds of anecdotes and his sense of humor, which anyone who knew Rothbard will mention. The first thing they'll mention oftentimes is just his smile, his cackling, his laughter, his sort of joyful presence, and also his great sense of humor. So we're not getting a lot of that here. This is young Rothbard, and this is Rothbard trying to be serious and write a very serious book at a very young age, as I discussed with Patrick Newman last week. So I'm just going to walk through some of the highlights of chapter one, Fundamentals of Human Action. So a lot of this derives straight from Mises, and a lot of this will be familiar to you if you've already studied Austrian economics to some extent, but it starts off with the concept of action. Human beings have to act. We are not self-contained units. We have to breathe air. We have to obtain food. We have to obtain clothing and shelter. We have to obtain water, and these are just the basics or else we die. So, you know, one of the things that Rothbard points out immediately is that when we're talking about economics, we're talking about purposeful action versus purely instinctive action. If the doctor hits your knee with a little rubber hammer and your foot reflex causes your foot to kick out, that's not something we study in terms of prexiology. That's just human instinct. And of course we're animals. We have more developed brain capacity and the ability to construct language and far more elaborate societies. And as a result, we have the ability to engage in exchange and trade. Unfortunately, we also have the ability to engage in statism and war and involuntary actions, but nonetheless, prexiology deals with purposeful human action, human activity. In a sense, then, there's no economics in the animal kingdom. We don't say what are the economics of a family of beavers building a dam because that's not really... Economics is a social science and very much a human social science, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. So Rothbard introduces the concept of action and then he introduces the concept of means and ends. So we think of means and ends. We're forced to act basically or perish. And even inaction in the human sense is you're doing something, you're sitting, you're occupying a space, naked somewhere on a rock or something after your mother births you. I mean, humans have to act once they reach a certain level of maturity after birth. So no matter what we do, we're acting, and as a result, we have to use the means that are available around us to try to achieve ends. So if all of this sounds a little basic, if all of this sounds almost silly that we have to lay this out, unfortunately, if you go and read economics, you'll find out that it's not that basic and not that silly because people tend to think economics just deals with finances or just deals with big companies and dollars and cents and all that. Well, you're starting off on the wrong foot. So the idea of means and ends brings up all kinds of concepts which will be elaborated on later in the book, which we're going to have to deal with, choice, scarcity, opportunity cost, all kinds of things. And of course, like Mises does at length later in human action, Rothbard lays out the temporal element of our action, of means and ends because everything in human life is uncertain. We are not guaranteed life tomorrow. We're not guaranteed that we won't die or be hit by a bus or contract a terrible illness. But whenever we do something with the future in mind, there's a lot of uncertainty and so we have to factor that uncertainty into everything we do. So the temporal element is so, so important in Austrian economics because Rothbard is setting the stage for later introducing the time preference theory of interest. So how do we explain interest? How do we explain why people will pay more than the cost of something to have it sooner before they save up for it? And why do we explain why other people will get paid for loaning money to those people who want to buy something now? Well, there's a lot of different theories on that and we've worked through some of those in previous shows. Bombarevac, we think solved it. Mises, of course, elaborated on it. But for example, the Marxists say, well, that's just exploitation. You know, the capitalist has the money, he's got the stuff and when he loans that money to the poor worker, he charges an interest. He's just exploiting him. He's just taking from him. Interest is stolen. I'm not sure that that explains negative interest rates. I think the Marxists are going to have to come up with a new concept to explain away negative interest rates because it sounds to me like instead of exploiting, you're helping the borrower here. But nonetheless, in Austrian terms, most Austrians, not all, but most broadly speaking Austrian economists accept the temporal or time preference theory of interest. So when Rothbard and Mises stress this, this is something that's really different than most mainstream economics. It's very important not only with interest but also with the idea of the structure of production, the temporal element between consumer goods and higher order goods and roundaboutness and how long it might take to develop something like a rocket that can make it to Mars as a simple widget or pencil or whatever else we might be producing. There's a huge difference between the amount of time and all the levels of production that go into those two things. So time really matters. And of course, we always prefer things, whatever kind of things, sooner rather than later. The reason for that is, again, because the future is uncertain and we might die or we might get old. I think we mentioned this on earlier shows, buying your dream house at age 90 is a very different thing than buying your dream house at age 40 because you're not going to have nearly as long to enjoy it and you probably won't be physically as robust as you were at 40. So that's just such an important factor in everything we look at from an Austrian perspective and it's oftentimes little regarded in mainstream economics books and texts. So of course, he talks about capital goods. The original factors of production are sort of wound up or bound up with this. The labor and land are the two original factors of production. We as humans can put our hands and our minds to things and toil, so that's labor and land would include all kinds of things like minerals and metals and plants and trees and fruits and all kinds of things. Labor and land are really the two original factors of production but we mix these two things together. We use them to create other capital goods. We might pull metal out of the ground and heat it and turn it into steel or whatever we do. So means and ends go to labor and land. Capital goods form sort of the technological means by which we go out and try to achieve our ends. How do we know what we want when it comes to human action? Well, Rothbard addresses this with the idea of ordinal versus cardinal rankings. And these rankings can go to what we might call utility. Economists have struggled to come up with a category of utiles. How many utiles is this worth to you? Well, it turns out that's a dead end. And if you just reach after one of Rothbard here, you'll understand why because whether we call it utility or value or happiness or whatever, what we're ranking here is our ordinal preferences, the order in which we prefer things, not our cardinal or rank preferences. We don't really have any way to say objectively how much more we prefer A to B. So if you think about this, you're thinking about what to get for dinner one night. You say, oh, you know, pizza sounds good. But how about sushi? Well, we just had sushi two nights ago, so at least tonight I'd rather have pizza. So you're expressing an interest in having pizza, which shows that on that given evening anyway, you prefer pizza to sushi. But how you would value that in economic terms? How you would assign a number to that? I mean, you could say my choice is pizza one, sushi two as an ordinal ranking. But you can't say I prefer to have pizza this evening 83% more than I prefer to have sushi. That sort of thing just doesn't make sense. So the ordinal versus cardinal ranking system is very, very important to understand all of these things like human action and choice and means and ends. So that's how we get, of course, to understanding things which are, again, foundational, fundamental, which is what this chapter is all about, things like marginal utility and why there is decreasing marginal utility as we get more and more of something. And that's something that in many ways people still don't get. I mean, this is the marginal revolution, so-called, of which manga was a part. It happened in the 1880s. We're talking more than 100 years ago, almost 140 years ago now. And people still don't get it. They still don't understand that when you have a billion dollars, let's say, an additional million dollars of net worth means far, far less to you than if you have a zero net worth and someone gives you a million dollars. Because all of a sudden with a million dollars from zero, you're going to be able to purchase a home. You're going to have a lot more economic security. You might be able to send your kids to college by a car, have money in the bank, which gives you peace of mind and security, all kinds of things. So the more you have of something, the less each traditional unit of that thing is worth to you. And so this is a fact of life. It's an axiomatic fact from which we can deduce all kinds of things. But yet when we look at tax policy, for example, it still seems to escape a lot of people's thinking. Really wealthy people, for example, spend far less of their total income and total net worth on things like groceries and transportation and insurance, you know, that sort of thing. Because they have, you know, they might eat fancier food, have a fancier car or something, but at the end of the day, it's still a much smaller fraction of their income than a really poor person who's struggling making $20,000 a year living in a trailer park. You know, almost all of their income is consumed by just food and maybe their gas bill, simple utilities, and maybe a car or a bus pass or something like that. So these, you know, these concepts are very important to understand when we think about economics in terms of policy. So we've talked about the concept of action, means and ends, the temporal elements and all of this, the original factors of production, labor and land. But of course, labor and land are mixed to produce capital goods and Rothbard goes into a nice explication of how you have consumer goods which were literally, you know, buying or building to consume right away, like a sandwich, for example, versus higher order producer goods. So you can go higher and higher into the structure of production and use capital goods, whether we call them higher order goods, producers goods, capital goods, whatever. There's more than one term, as Rothbard points out. All of these are used ultimately to produce consumers goods. But as an economy and a society becomes more advanced and I would say more civilized, you have a longer and longer stage of, excuse me, a longer and longer chain of production. In other words, production becomes more roundabout. We have more and more higher order goods and that's a happy thing, that's a healthy thing and that's why I like the term higher order because it conjures up the idea that, you know, higher achieving or more civilized or whatever you want to think because one thing Rothbard does it a couple of times throughout this chapter is he uses the example of a Robinson Crusoe scenario. What's a Robinson Crusoe scenario? Well, think of the man trapped alone on an island. So there's no real economy. It's a construct when we think of a Crusoe economy just like the evenly rotating economy which we discussed during human action is a construct. And so a lot of people say, well, you know, that's not how economics takes place. You're just looking at a solitary man on an island. That's not really very useful. But when we're stripping everything down to brass tax, when we're trying to start over and really understand from the beginning what economics is all about and that's what we need to do. That's desperately what we need to do in this country. Is get back to a fundamental and foundational understanding of how you build a real economy based on production and capital accumulation and higher and higher levels of productivity, not on smoke and mirrors and money creation and credit creation and central banking and financialization. We have to get back to this. And so if you're listening to this show, you have an interest in understanding root causes of things almost by definition. If you're interested in this show and interested in this huge book. And look, it's a lot easier and in some ways more fun just like eating snacks to just be on social media talking about current events. But we have to do both. I mean, we have to be out there attacking the mainstream and some of these bad ideas. But in order to do that, we have to know what we're talking about. And so a lot of libertarians and a lot of sort of armchair economists of which I guess I'm one. I'm not a professional trained economist. In fact, I'm not an economist at all. But like the rest of you, I want to have informed opinions about this because economic shapes the world. Certainly shapes, unfortunately, the political world. And so we have to know what we're talking about. And sometimes that means reading dense books in order to then go on to social media or go argue with someone or go make the case with your city council or something. So we have to do both. And you know, some people would say, oh, my gosh, here we have the countries in an upheaval. And you guys are talking about some 11 or 1200 page book from the 60s. Well, because if we are going to build our own institutions or God forbid have to rebuild, then we need to be right. We need to have the starting point and we need to know how things work. And chapter one, the fundamentals of human action in Murray Rothbard's man economy and state. When it comes to economics is a primer on how things work. And so that's why we're reading this book again. That's why we're doing this podcast. So I'm going to conclude with a nod to this incredible little appendix at the end towards, you know, again, only a 77 page chapter. If you only read it, you would be in great shape. But this little appendix that Rothbard includes at the end, it's only about five pages long. It's about appendix A, praxeology and economics. If you read this, which you should go do right now online, mises.org, just type in man economy and state. And you can pull up the HTML version of this book, which is searchable. You can just go to the end of chapter one. And he lays out basically what the method of economics is, praxeology, so briefly and so simply. I mean, I wish that we could put these four or five pages into the hands of every Austrian critic, really of every economist, and just say, hey, look, no matter what you think about economics, no matter where you reside on an ideological scale, no matter what you think your school of thought is, just read this. You know, that's, I think it would help. So he basically starts off this appendix by saying, look, economic analysis is of the form, colon A, one, assert A, action axiom. Two, if A then B, if B then C, if C then D, et cetera, by rules of logic, therefore we assert the truth of BCD, et cetera. I mean, it sounds so simple, but it is absolutely revolutionary today because we are so mired in empirical economics, stats, math, econometrics, formulas, models that we've lost sight of the concept of axiomatic or theoretical economics. And so very, very important to distinguish. And frankly, if you, you know, Joe Salerno posits that a praxeological approach is the single biggest factor in determining who is working within the Austrian tradition versus, you know, maybe Austrian adjacent or something like that. He, you know, he posits the praxeological approach is really at the core or essence of the Austrian school. And when it comes to the distinctions between some of the things we've been talking about as fundamentals of human action, if you continue in this appendix, Rothbard really lays out the distinction between several different disciplines, which I think was just so awesome and so worth mentioning. He says to sum up the relationship and the distinctions between praxeology and each of the other disciplines, we may describe them as follows. Why man chooses various ends? That's psychology. Okay, if you want to read Mises on this, especially in the ultimate foundations of economic science, he talks about thymology, which is somewhat, you know, which is related to psychology. So a lot of what poses as behavioral economics is really some sort of weird hybrid with psychology. So why man chooses various ends psychology? That's the why. We all have psychological motivations. Some of those are in our hindbrain. Who knows? So there's, you know, and just, you know, mere hunger in your belly on an animal level, you have to eat that sort of thing. But there's, once you get a little higher than that, you're talking about psychology. So that's the why. The what. What men's end should be, Rothbard continues. That is the philosophy of ethics. So the why is psychology. The what is ethics. What should we do? Okay, that has a normative component to it. That's ethics. So neither of those things are economics, by the way. Three, how. We've got the why, the what, now the how. How do you use means to arrive at ends? Rothbard has a simple word, technology. Early on, that might have been a fishing net. Later, it might have been a spear. Later, it might have been a bow and arrow. Later, it might have been gunpowder and a hunting rifle. Later, it might have been agriculture. Well, agriculture preceded gunpowder and a hunting rifle, but you get my drift. All of these technologies developed to help people eat food to kill fash or wildlife. Okay, so the how is technology. The what. So we've got why, what how, and now what men's ends are and have been, and how man has used means to obtain them. That's history. So a lot of what we call empirical economics is really economic history, and there's nothing wrong with that. It has tremendous value. The data, you know, that helps us understand human action, but data by definition is looking in the rear view mirror. By definition, you're talking about what people did. That helps us, but human beings are not molecules. We're not, you know, parts of an atom. We sometimes act in irrational and unpredictable ways, totally unlike how we've acted before. Just look at America 2020. So economic history is just that, history. And I think that's something very important to understand here. And finally, the formal implications of the fact that man used means to obtain various chosen ends is praxeology. So this is probably the best little neatest distinction I've ever seen between psychology, ethics, technology, history, and praxeology. And in vintage Rothbard style, it's done forcefully. So that comes at the end of the chapter, chapter one. And I think you're going to really enjoy reading this. And frankly, you could just read this as a standalone essay, 77 pages, and I think you would absolutely deepen and increase your understanding of what economics really is. So that is our show today, ladies and gentlemen. Again, go to Mises.org, go to our bookstore, use the code HAPOD for Human Action Podcast, and you'll get a $5 discount off either the hardcover or paperback. We're going to link to the HTML, which is absolutely free, searchable, clickable by chapter, so it works through it very nicely. And this book is laid out strictly by chapters. It doesn't have parts, overriding parts like human action. So this is just one chapter after another. It does build on previous chapters. So it's not a desk reference. It's not something that you can necessarily just bounce around in and pick up. But it does have value as a desk reference. If you just wanted to pick it up and read the chapter on monopoly, for example, that would be an eye-opener for most, I think, mainstream economists. So we're going to link to the HTML. Now, we're also going to link to the study guide to this book, which is something Bob Murphy produced back in, I want to say, 0405. Let me look real quick to see when Bob did that. But it's a great, great edition, 2006, actually. It's a great edition of your arsenal. It's sort of the spark notes or cliff notes to this book, and it might help you understand. It's got some great questions and everything in it. So if you're reading the book seriously, the study guide is something that's going to deepen your understanding. If you're reading the book in a skimming or less serious fashion, consider the study guide something that's going to help you do that, too. It can serve as your crutch. So be sure to check the book out, check out the HTML, and hopefully read along with us, because we're going to have some great guests in the coming weeks. We're going to work our way through this book, probably over the series of five to eight, maybe, total shows. And I think you're going to benefit from it and enjoy it. That said, we appreciate you listening along, following the Human Action Podcast. And again, we hope all of you have a great, safe, healthy Fourth of July weekend. Catch you next week.