Comments Elsewhere

Cal,

I won’t presume to speak for “all modern economics.” (My own education in economics is mainly in the Austrian tradition.) But I will say that you have evidently misunderstood Von Mises and Rothbard if you think that they are claiming the same thing that you say they are claiming. You have repeatedly attempted to distinguish the revealing of value in action and the value itself — an attempt which presupposes that you have some clear concept of what it is for to value X which can be characterized independently of the revealing of a preference of X over Y, in the context of a choice, as if you could somehow understand the value that Jones attaches to X without having considered whether he would prefer X over alternatives given the choice. If you’ll re-read the line in Von Mises that you yourself bolded, you’ll find that that presupposition is precisely what Von Mises denies. The entire point of his discussion is that an understanding of value — in the sense of “value” relevant to economics — only falls out of an analysis of purposive choices among alternatives. There are other senses of value which he considers, some of which are comparative (e.g. wishing) and others of which may not be (e.g. psychological attitudes, such as having feelings of pleasure or admiration), but the point of considering these alternative senses of “to value” is to show that they are not the sorts of valuing that (Von Mises holds) are studied by the science of economics.