Comments Elsewhere

Cal: Charles, you’ve missed the point entirely …

Maybe so, but I can’t see how the passage you’ve bolded would show me that. Von Mises conceives of “the actual behavior of individuals” in terms of the selection of more highly valued states of affairs over less highly valued states of affairs, as he says in the passage I quoted further down. To say that a scale of values has no independent existence apart from the actual behavior of individuals is to say that it has no independent existence apart from the revealed comparative preference for one state of affairs over another. (Any other sense of valuing is, for Von Mises, not part of the subject-matter of praxeology.) Hence, Von Mises’s understanding of “value” in economics is explicitly comparative, not a matter of appreciating or admiring a thing or a state of affairs in isolation from comparisons to alternative states of affairs. Just what do you think I am missing?

Cal: think about your question…

I don’t think I had a question, except to ask Kyle for the sources from which he was drawing his view of what senses of “value” are relevant to subjectivist economics. (Because that view of the matter seems, to my best understanding, rather idiosyncratic, and directly in conflict with the versions presented in, e.g., Von Mises and Rothbard.)