Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1582

Carbon of a letter from Heath to F. A. Harper.

November 29, 1956

 

 

 

 

Dear Dr. Harper:

     I think it is just too bad that our friend, Henry Hazlitt, had to dredge up out of von Mises his negative assertion that there is no measurement or unit of measurement in the field of human action. What makes society rational in the same sense that inanimate nature is rational is the employment of units to measure the human energy or action that flows freely among the members of an economic society.

     If there were no measuring, there could be no accountancy and no rational means of determining how the members stand with respect to their obligations one to another. Without the rationality of the market, all transfers of human action would be regulated by the emotions, positive or negative, precisely as in the case of animals or biological and pre-social organization — love and self-sacrifice on the one hand, dog-eat-dog on the other.

     I think your questions are very much to the point. All things in nature are quantitative. They are also qualitative, positively or negatively so, according as they serve or retard the advancement of life in its highest forms.

I

     Anyhow, no negative statement about anything can be positively proved. I think Mr. Hazlitt’s animad­versions against mathematical economics, as commonly applied, are in the main well taken, but that he re­coiled against it too strongly to keep on an even keel.

Cordially,