"To defend the truth, to articulate it with humility and conviction, and to bear witness to it in life are therefore exacting and indispensable forms of charity."

H. H. Benedict XVI. Caritas in Veritate Encyclical. June 29, 2009

Friday, April 17, 2009

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.

2 comments:

Adrián said...

How could enter "leisure" in a praxeologically relevant classification?

Adrián said...

Leisure is unobeyed human action undertaken for the own consumption of the agent.