Tracing consequences both seen and unseen.
Wirkman VirkkalaRepurposing Capital: Human Action
Posted at 8:54 pm on September 23, 2013, by Wirkman Virkkala

In an economic downturn, when massive business failures appear simultaneously, owners of the means of production need to find new uses for their discarded capital-intensive production processes, and investors need to find new forward-looking enterprises to place their funds, in hopes of some future return.

This is part of the recalculation necessary during the cluster of business errors called a depression.

The terminology I’m using is that of the Austrian school, of its capital theory as well as its theory of the business cycle.

And I’m applying it to this very blog.

Which has been comatose for some time.

I invite the former participants in The Lesson Applied to give Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, a careful reading. Or re-reading, as your case may be. Writers, contact me on Facebook and I’ll sign you up for Reading Matters, a Facebook group that will handle some of the technical matters of our co-ordinated reading. I propose to read this long treatise chapter by chapter, moving on when a consensus of active readers agree.

This blog will be location for our ruminations. That is, we will discuss the book and its ideas here.

Perhaps after we’ve read Human Action, the blog will revive back to its original purpose, of exploring the ramifications of policy upon market society, beyond stage one, as Thomas Sowell so neatly put it, in a Hazlittian spirit.

Always, lingering in our thoughts, will be Bastiat’s insight: where in Mises’ work does it fit?


Filed under: Economic Theory, Education, Philosophy
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Henry Hazlitt"[T]he whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."
Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson
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