[justushamalaine]

I have ended up with different understanding from Von Mises text. The point is that economics need to progress from axioms that are true.

This means that we start with axioms like humans have ideas how to improve their situation. Humans act with the goal of attaining to ideas they have. These are something that we can't or don't need to prove. With these two axioms we can start creating a complete set of reasonings that will explain market phenomena that happens in the real world.

And the reason why this is needed and is so important is that there are no constants in the realm of human action. That is the criticism of positivism in economics.

Positivist methods can help greatly with building theories in "natural sciences" as there are mechanistic actions and constants that are revealed by comparing rations. (this is the way we got to understand how atoms bind to molecules and how strong the gravity is). We haven't found similar constants in market phenomena and Von Mises thought we never will.

But we have found laws like the law of supply and demand or comparative advantage. And that we have reached with using only reasoning.