Teenage motherhood

Currently in Costa Rica there's a policy which looks for teenage mothers to remain in school.

By lowering the oportunity cost of teenage motherhood, this policy is encouraging teenage motherhood.

The more you help a teenage mother, the more you promote teenage motherhood, ceteris paribus.

Costa Rican policy on teenage mothers is a subsidy to irresponsibility.

Oil depletion never to happen

If people don't value oil, they don't extract it, so there's no depletion.

If people value it, they are going to try to buy it. The more the buy, the scarcer it turns. The scarcer it turns, the more expensive it is; so the less demanded it is and the slower it is extracted.

Extraction is going to arrive to a halt before complete depletion occurs.

Mises versus Rothbard on praxeology

From reading and comparing Mises's Human Action and Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State, I conclude that you can learn better praxeology from Mises but more praxeology from Rothbard.

To me, these two books aren't substitute but complementary goods.

Problems are always for free

A situation which an agent wants to be "solved" is always a condition of his environment. Nobody is ever to incur (not even can he) in a cost for something which perceives as creating uneasiness.

Absolutely anything which is perceived as a problem, as something which provokes uneasiness, occurs in itself with no cost to the agent.

It's solution what can be costly.

Systematic failure of expectations

What is fundamentally relevant to answer in praxeology is not how agents form expectations but why expectations can fail systematically.

Since a systematic failure praxeologically analyzable can only occur with respect to the value of money and the interest, an expectations theory is only of avail in monetary theory and in theory of capital.

While a systematic failure of expectations on, say, choice of technology or industry be only viewed as a psychologic or otherwise statistic affair but not liable to praxeologic analysis, this failure is can't be a part of praxeology. By the way, historically people have learnt to avoid this kind of non praxeologic failure of expectations, so these failures tend to be more and more shortlived and innocuous.

The problem with systematic failure of expectations on money value and interest is precisely that the phenomenon is such that experience isn't enough guarantee of protection in the presence of governmental intervention.

Entrepreneur versus worker

The entrepreneur is, by definition, an ultimate decision taker. (1) Entrepreneurial human action is never based on obeying someone else's commands.

A human action undertaken by obeying other agent's command is not entrepreneurial but laboral. This is: labor is a human action commanded by someone else. So understood, labor can't be but social. Robinson Crusoe alone in his island can't be a worker. He'll remain an entrepreneur while not in the company of someone else's who gives him commands.

Human action only can be either entrepreneurial or laboral. The materialistic classification of goods of higher order among capital, labor, and land is an atavism of past political conflicts irrelevant to praxeology.

A command is understood as issuable only by agents and obeyable only by agents.

(1) Compare to Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State, page 64.

Production and valuation as opposed processes

Lower order goods give value to higher order goods used to produce the first ones. Value goes from lower to higher order goods.

The process of production goes all the way back. Higher order goods serve to produce lower order goods. Production goes from higher to lower order goods.

The role of the entrepreneur is guessing a production process which back-matches a process of deriving value. This and only this is what the role of the entrepreneur is all about.