"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

Saturday, July 25, 2009

What and what is not production

Is there a praxeologic relevance in differentiating between changing what's external to the mind in order to accommodate it to a given scale of values and changing the scale itself in order to accommodate it to a given "external-to-the-mind"?

Yes, there is. A change in the value scale, since is internal to the mind, has no human action manifestation whatsoever.

A change in the outmind can occur by way of either human action or not. Every change in the outmind which brings it closer to the (subjetive) satisfaction of wants is production.

Every successful (in terms of effective satisfaction of wants) human action is at once human action and production. Unsuccessful human action is human action but not production. External changes turning into satisfaction of wants occurred without the concourse of human action are production but not human action.

Every human action aims at production. So, is there a relevant role for the concept of consumption in praxeology? Nope. Consumption is a thymologic, not a praxeologic, concept. There where production ends and consumption begins is the exact frontier between the realms of praxeology and thymology.

Production without human action is production at no cost. (1)

(1) Confront against Israel Kirzner's An Essay on Capital. 1966 -Augustus M. Kelly, Publishers-. Page 5: "Any program of production [...] involves costs." However, here the word program must be interpreted as referring to (by definition deliberate) human action exclusively; this is, excluding "non-human-action production". This interpretation is backed by the sentence in Kirzner next to the previously quoted: "As seen by the economist the cost to [the agent] of the production program that he adopts, consists in the opportunities that he has rejected in order to exploit the program that he has adopted."

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