Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant, but there are still some flaws.
Review: This is one of the great texts in Economics, philosophy, or any field for that matter.However, there are some serious flaws that need to be dealt with. The first is Mises' dealing with time preference. Mises presents a terrible argument justifying the universality of a positive rate of time preference. Mises States: " The very act of gratifying a desire implies that gratification at the present instant is preferred to that at a later instant. He who consumes a nonperishable good instead of postponing consumption for an indefinite later moment thereby reveals a higher valuation of present satisfaction as compared with later satisfaction. If he were not to prefer satisfaction in a nearer period of the future to that in a remoter period, he would never consume and so satisfy wants. He would always accumulate, he would never consume and enjoy." There is a huge problem with this reasoning. It would hold true only if there were an identity between periods. Like all constructs, time preference only operates in cases of "all else being equal". Lets say I had a neutral rate of time preference, and had the opportunity to eat a hamburger now or in an hour. If I don't eat it now, if all else is equal, I would not be able to eat it an hour from now. Hence, given that fact that people DO act, doesn't this show that people have a positive rate of time preference? Not at all. Everything is NOT equal from time to time. Lets say that in the hour, my tastes change to be more favorable towards pizza,or I sense that something will happen in the future to prevent me from eating it, then I would be able to eat it. Since we can't observe a state in which all else is equal from time to time, we can't use the fact that we observe humans acting as a basis for proving we all have a positive rate of time preference. Mises even admits that peoples preferences and reasons for action do change over time, and this affects their actions (see section entitled "The Temporal Relation Between Actions "). I will now deflect some criticisms of this book. On page 314, Mises does say the successful entrepreneur can't learn their craft on the job, and that business schools only train people for "routine jobs". However, Mises concept of entrepreneurship differs from that of the common usage. To Mises, an entrepreneur is not an innovator (a function he mentioned in a fairly unrelated previous paragraph), but one who buys goods that have been undercapitalized or over-discounted. Harvard Business school can't teach one to do that particular job. Also, Mises doesn't really argue that a ban on the advertising of quack medicine will actually lead to a ban on religion. He argues that once an intellectual argues for a ban on quack medicine, and then someone launched an anti religion crusade, it would be difficult for the intellectual to resist their argument and remain consistent. Despite some linguistic ambiguities, he is not talking about the "slippery slope" in the more pragmatic realm of politics.
Rating: 
Summary: Mixed Bag
Review: This work towers above the mediocore garbage that currently passes for economic writing. (As late as 1989, Samuelson could say with a straight face that the Soviet economy was more productive than ours!) This book can be traced directly to the Austrian School of Classical Liberalism that attempts to define economic activity in terms of human activity, wants and needs. This is in direct contradiction to modern "economic speak" in which it is a given that the State play a vital if not pervasive role in individual human economic activity. Von Mises, Hayek and Menger (among others) were diametrically opposed to a "middle way" between statism (socialism/fascism) and capitalism for one simple reason: Statism, once introduced, becomes the dominant force and eventually wins the contest since in a centrally-run economy all economic decisions become political ones. Von Mises struggled his whole life to develop general rules for economic activity. There was (and is) a gray area in which economic theory and economic reality coexist in an uneasy relationship. Despite von Mises assertion that economics was basically a theoretical science - as opposed to physics or chemistry where axioms could be physically proven - he continued to maintain that economics was a rational science based upon human needs. It is this latter point that exalts his work. For perhaps the first time since Adam Smith he set about demonstrating that Capitalism is the economic system most conducive to human nature, how it makes the most sense from a "human" point of view of wants and needs and rewards and - most important - how it delivers the goods and affects material life. Both von Mises and Hayek were convinced that when the state attempts to lead economic activity, failure and misery are sure to follow since it would eventually become a contest among competing interest groups, each vying for their turn at the trough (which it has). Von Mises's work on economic swings was another example of brilliant logic that has held true ever since. Hayek, because he was convinced of the evolutionary nature of the economic system, also believed in cycles. HUMAN ACTION does its part in demonstrating the correlation between increasing State control of the economy and decreasing individual freedom. After having heard yet another of the Presidential campaign "debates" it is apparent that the "debaters" get their economic schooling from the editorial page. Let us pray this is a farce for the uneducated and they really don't believe what they say. If they do, the Viennese Classical School was correct in its predictions.
| 
