>>62633
>You're only giving him a way out this way.
How could it be that I am helping him? Please elaborate.
>>62631
While I think that you are fundamentally correct, I still oppose such rhetoric for the very fact that it will not convince people like Wolff or any other socialist. Their response would probably be that you are so deep into bourgeois ideology that you can think of feelings and sentiments like love, patriotism, friendship etc. as mere manifestations of some obscure, abstract "axiom of action", that you're willing and attempting to economize and commodify emotions. I don't think that we (even though I myself am not a libertarian, rather a classical liberal) should further the theory more then it should be, trying to employ praxeological means to explain phenomena such as feelings. Even Mises quite explicitely separated the study of feelings and general conditions of human beings (which he called thymology and which we now would probably refer to as psychology) from the study of purposeful human action (namely praxeology).
>[Thymology] is what a man knows about the way in which people value different conditions, about their wishes and desires and their plans to realize these wishes and desires. It is the knowledge of the social environment in which a man lives and acts or, with historians, of a foreign milieu about which he has learned by studying special sources.[2] Why one man chooses water and another man wine is a thymological (or, in traditional terminology, psychological) problem. But it is of no concern to praxeology and economics. The subject matter of praxeology and of that part of it which is so far best developed─economics─is action as such and not the motives that impel a man to aim at definite ends.[3]
To may way of thinking (and Mises' definition) love and other feelings are simply values that we ascribe to other people and these values govern the way we behave. In other words, the feeling of love is a psychological/thymological fact that has important praxeological implications for a person who experiences them - namely he/she is driven to spend as much time as possible with the object of one's desire.