In his paper “Realism And Abstraction In Economics: Arostotle and Mises Versus Friedman” Long quotes Hulsmann, who writes:
“Austrian economics is based on the insight that human behavior and human
thoughts are only a part of human action, namely, the part that is realized (that is
“there”). Other parts of human action are not – or not yet – realized. These are, in
particular, (a) the purposes in pursuit of which humans act and (b) the foregone
alternatives that could have been chosen. Purposes and foregone alternatives are
obviously not part of the world in the sense that they are realized.”
The reason I started this topic is that I don’t understand this excerpt. Precisely, the first problem I’m facing is the meaning of the verb “to realize” in this context. In my dictionary it is: 1) to understand 2) to make real. If the use of the first was intended, then why we cannot realize (a) and (b)? If the second: how can we realize human thoughts(we can realize them only by using human behavior as a basis for them, so then what’s the purpose of this dichotomy between behavior and thoughts)? At this point the second aspect of this issue arrives. From what perspective can we realize thoughts? I mean one can realize his own thoughts, (a) and (b), but he can’t realize thoughts, (a) and (b) of anybody else. I hope I’ve mad it clear and now waiting for someone showing my fallacy. If I don’t commit any, then Hulsmann and Long are wrong.
The second excerpt, which I have trouble with is:
“What economic law does guarantee is that the level of unemployment will be higher under a minimum wage law than it would have been without the law”
Let’s conceive an imaginary construction of US economy without any minimum wage law. Then the government enforces minimum wage law of 2 cents per hour. Does the level of unemployment increases? I think: not.
My last doubt concerns this fragment:
“The trajectory of a falling object is the resultant
of all the forces acting on it; if during a given period an object would fall five feet if gravity were
the only force acting on it, then whatever other forces may be acting on the object, we can still
predict that the object will end up five feet further downward than it would have if gravity had
not been acting on it.”
I’m not a physicist so i might be wrong, but let’s consider the analogue situation. Force x alone is making object move into some direction 5 ft. further. Force y alone is making object move into the same direction 7 ft. further, but these forces altogether move object 15 ft.. Thus we cannot ‘predict that the object will end up five feet further’ in that direction than it would have if force x had not been acting on it. I think forces not necessarily have to have linear character, like in wave interference. Another example may be force(which is gradually increasing in power) acting on heavy object. Object remains steady until the force moves it, then force moves that object gradually faster. This case shows us that the ratio between the magnitude of this force and the speed/acceleration of this object isn’t constant, so that we can’t add and subtract any constant magnitude freely.