Consider two societies.

A: All people are equally poor.
B: The people har have unequal wealth, but the poorest individual in B is wealthier than anyone in A.

A person or group of people preferring equality to prosperity to the degree of choosing A over B is of course logically possible, but do we actually find any? Not many I would guess.

The paper makes frequent reference to some tyrant who doesn’t care about his subjects, but this is to misunderstand what Mises is doing. He’s not talking to tyrants about how to run their societies, but to individuals. The question is not really “what type of society are we to have?” but rather “what type of society are you to advocate for?” If he’s talking to someone who claims to want what the modern liberal claims to want, the conclusion will be “then you must embrace freedom.” If he’s talking to the tyrant, the conclusion will be “then you should embrace tyranny.” There is no profit in attempting to persuade tyrants to love freedom.

So, if within a society, people come to different conclusions, what is to be done? How are we to decide whose answer to accept? Certainly not by majority rule, or some such mechanism. Mises gives no answer because no answer is possible, other than the one given by history – fight it out. What else do we have?

A small issue I have with the paper – the reference to redistributive policies runs basically as follows: governments have done X, X harms prosperity, hence governments don’t care about prosperity. This is fallacious, and goes to the heart of Mises’ point – a person can easily be wrong about how to achieve something. For example: I turned the knob on the right, turning that knob resulted in increased amounts of water flowing onto the floor rather than decreased – it need not follow that I wanted more water on the floor. I was simply mistaken about the result of turning the knob. Meanwhile, why was the policy of redistribution undertaken? Notice the reliance, when available, on theories of economics which predict that redistribution will bring about more prosperity – this seems to indicate that it was undertaken, incorrectly, in order to bring about more prosperity.

Of course, this really was his view. He wasn’t kidding about it and looking for a good way to defend liberty, he really believed that we cannot say anything about ends and so forth. So to suggest that a problem with his view is that it does not support liberty well in an imagined set of circumstances seems odd. In fact, the proposed correction seems odd too – shouldn’t our philosophy guide our political conclusions, rather than starting with the conclusions and then looking for some adequate basis?

And the point that freedom is better for people as a collective holds whether this is only based on the values people actually do have, or if it is further based in a natural law system.

I think a nice consequence of Mises view is that you can leave out ethical controversy and dogmatism, and instead stick to the facts about which economic systems do work and what people actually do want in real life. Liberal policies are the best different groups of people in spite of their theoretical disagreements, given the goals they actually follow in life.

I would suppose that you dont agree on one major natural law principle then? One key point of natural law is that it is accessible to secular reason, even though this law may be given by God ultimately.

In addition, given that Praxeology is a normative method in that it explains why things are the way they are from the basis of actions, “ethical absolutism” causes this method to break down. This is to say that unless there is a supreme arbiter of ethics we cannot talk in absolutes given the subjective nature of Praxeology. However, the arbitration of value is taken care of by the free-market mechanism. Using this subjective, economic ideal we can say that it is a tautology that the absence of coercion produces the best outcomes due to the fact that a free-market reality is made up of completely voluntary transactions. Where we go astray with this line of reasoning is when we predict with certainty what that free-market reality will look like and ascribe to it some sort of order. (Austrians argue against EMH for this very reason.)

In short, either we have an ethical absolute that describes exactly nothing because it has no predictive value or our ethical absolute is not freedom, but a utopian construction where we can authoritatively assign people to the appropriate circle of Hell based on a moral absolute.

Given Mises’s experience, one can see why he was adamant in his relativism.

To me the article shows that there must be an objective standard beyond government. A moral paradigm that government is held account to.

I can logically find non in a secular worldview.

But I dont think Mises needs any help from “Natural law” philosophy, be it religious or secular.

Basically, one of Mises key points is that even though values are subjective, in the actual world all significant religions and ideological systems embrace quite similar values like prosperity being better than poverty, the disutility of labour and safety from war and crime. Thus Mises need not appeal to an objective value system when confronting a socialist. He can just point out that liberalism is a better political philosophy for creating prosperity and giving the working class better living standards etc etc

In succession, the paper contained:

1.) The presentation of Mises’s defense of liberty
(Mises only economically defends liberty).

2). The presentation of the flaw in Mises’s defense of liberty
(There is a need to morally defend liberty).

3). The presentation of the foundation of the flaw in Mises’s defense of liberty and the understanding through which it is attended
(The ethical relativism which disallows Mises to morally defend liberty is said to be born of the personal preferences of disparate individuals).

4). The presentation of the foundation of a more comprehensive alternative to Mises’s defense of liberty
(Ethical absolutism allows one to morally defend liberty).

5). The presentation of the understanding through which the foundation of a more comprehensive alternative to Mises’s defense of liberty is attended
(Ethical Absolutism is said to be most plausibly born of the moral order of a Necessary Standard).

6).The presentation of a more comprehensive alternative to Mises’s defense of liberty
(It is through both the science espoused by Mises and the philosophy of the ethical absolutist that liberty may be most comprehensively defended).

The paper may be open to various accusations (God is not the Necessary Standard of the moral order, there exists no such order, Mises’s defense is the most comprehensive, etc.), however it seems, based on what it set out to demonstrate, that the paper could hardly be thought of as off-topic.

We must reject the urge to dismiss as meandering what is more likely a difference of worldview.