Calvinism and von Mises on Human Action

A while back a few of us in my office were discussing Calvinism around the water cooler. Much of the talk related to the concept of free will, a mysterious concept if there ever was one. Even many of those who agree that man has free will can’t agree on what free will means.

At the same time, I was discussing economics with my office’s class of interns. One of the things we discussed is the concept of economics as a science; the regularity of human action allows economist to develop laws about the economic operation of the world in just the same way that mathematicians, for instance, can develop laws about the properties of numbers and figures.

After thinking about these things a bit, I’ve found it fascinating that these two areas of study, one championed by reformed Christians and the other by—in part—agnostic Jews, have a lot in common.

One take on this topic, Does God Desire All to be Saved?, is by John Piper. As I wrote in my Goodreads review of it:

The mystery of God is great; His infinite ways are too much for our finite minds to comprehend. Sometimes it is good to sit and marvel at these mysteries in faith. Other times it is profitable to use our God-given intellect to probe as deeply as we can into them. Piper has probed deep and well here into the seeming paradox of God’s election of his people and His desire that all be saved. On the one hand, we see that God has chosen some–but not all–to be saved as His people. On the other, it appears that “God loves everyone and invites everyone to come, and wants them all to be saved.” Which are we to believe? Both, according to Piper. Though we will never understand fully in our minds that which we believe in faith, we are still called to believe since this is what the Bible tells us.

Related to this is the short pamphlet, A Primer on Free Will, by John H. Gerstner. Here is an excerpt:

You, being a rational person, will always choose what seems to you to be the right thing, the wise thing, the advisable thing to do. If you choose not to do the right thing, the advisable thing, the thing you are inclined to do, you would, of course, be insane. You would be choosing something you didn’t choose. You would find something preferable, which you didn’t  prefer. But you, being a rational and sane person, choose something because it seems to you to be the right, proper, good, advantageous thing to do. …

Now, you see, that sort of thing—choosing regardless of considerations, or choosing without considerations, or choosing against considerations, and so on, is precisely what 95 percent of the people mean when they talk about free will. … When I tell them that when they choose to rea this book, they could not not choose to read this book, they feel that they are in bondage. They think that I have taken their freedom away from them when I say, “You must choose according to what seems good to you.” It is the end of all freedom, when it is said that they must do something, and they cannot do something else, and it is impossible for them to do such and such a thing, and it is necessary for them to do such a thing. …

Intelligent considerations are what determine the behavior of rational human beings. As a rational human being, you don’t have the freedom to deny those considerations. You must, necessarily, act according to what you think is the right way, the proper way, the good way, the advantageous way to act.

I came to Reformed Theology later than I came to Austrian economics. Perhaps one thing that attracted me to the reformed view of Scripture is that, particularly in the case of free will, it matches up with a view of economics whose most famous modern champions are agnostic Jews. Here’s how Ludwig von Mises talks about human action:

Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego’s meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person’s conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life.

He further puts the concept in the context of Christianity:

The characteristic mark of ultimate ends is that they depend entirely on each individual’s personal and subjective judgment, which cannot be examined, measured, still less corrected by any other person. Each individual is the only and final arbiter in matters concerning his own satisfaction and happiness. As this fundamental cognition is often considered to be incompatible with the Christian doctrine, it may be proper to illustrate its truth by examples drawn from the early history of the Christian creed. The martyrs rejected what others considered supreme delights, in order to win salvation and eternal bliss. They did not heed their well-meaning fellows who exhorted them to save their lives by bowing to the statue of the divine emperor, but chose to die for their cause rather than to preserve their lives by forfeiting everlasting happiness in heaven. What arguments could a man bring forward who wanted to dissuade his fellow from martyrdom? He could try to undermine the spiritual foundations of his faith in the message of the Gospels and their interpretation by the Church. This would have been an attempt to shake the Christian’s confidence in the efficacy of his religion as a means to attain salvation and bliss. If this failed, further argument could avail nothing, for what remained was the decision between two ultimate ends, the choice between eternal bliss and eternal damnation. Then martyrdom appeared the means to attain an end which in the martyr’s opinion warranted supreme and everlasting happiness.

While he is talking about human action in a study of economics rather than free will in a study of theology, von Mises winds up in the same place as Gerstner. It is the compulsion, if you will, of the free will of men that so orders the action of men that economics may be called a science. It is where we derive the laws of economics, like supply and demand. It is why they may be called laws.  The Austrians rely heavily on this. Not so most “mainstream” economists today. They rely on, believe in, only what they observe; or more precisely, in their own interpretation of what they observe. Thus can our good friend Paul Krugman espouse his policies that defy the laws of economics; he doesn’t really believe in economic laws, or at least in economic laws constructed by the individual, free (though compelled) choices of man.

Austrians, however, know that human actions can be ordered by laws because people always act in the same way; they always choose what they desire, what they think will better their lives, and they do so only after consideration. Thus there is order to the world of humans in much the same way there is order to nature.  However, unlike the order of nature, this order can be known without observation. The difference being that in nature, order is attained by particles acting under the physical laws of God, and we can see this only by our observation. In the economy, however, order is attained through the free will of human decisions and, being humans, we can know how humans will act even without observing those actions. Thus the future is not precisely predicted based on observations of the past; instead, it is predicted through the application of economic laws derived from the actions of men who always choose to act according to their free will.

I’ll close with this quote from Blaise Pascal, who I think has captured the essence of all this as well as anyone:

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.

Except, of course, for God Himself:

One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple. (Psalm 27:4 ESV)