Freedom and necessity

[avram]

I spent a bit of Friday night expounding on my quarter-baked theory (not even a theory, really, just a couple of observations) about an intersection of economics and quantum mechanics, which I’m going to start calling “quantum catalactics” now that I’ve discovered the latter word.

But you don’t get to hear about it yet, despite drcpunk noodging me. I’m doing some research to flesh it out a bit, and try to reduce the number of people to whom I’d come off as an idiot. Part of this is making sure that what I’ve been calling “the exchange theory of value” really is called that. I googled a bit, and found an online copy of Epistemological Problems of Economics by Ludwig von Mises. This book has a chapter called “Freedom and Necessity”, which I’m quite sure Steven Brust and/or Emma Bull had in mind when they chose that as the name for their collaborative epistolary fantasy novel set in the 19th century. A quote:

Consequently, the conformity of the phenomena of the world to natural law must appear to us as the foundation of our human existence, as the ultimate basis of our being human. Thinking about it cannot fill us with fear, but, on the contrary, must comfort us and give us a feeling of security. We are able to act at all—that is to say, we have the power to order our conduct in such a way that the ends we desire can be attained—only because the phenomena of the world are governed not by arbitrariness, but by laws that we have the capacity to know something about. If it were otherwise, we should be completely at the mercy of forces that we should be unable to understand.