The comments on my first attempt got swamped. (Hey kids, can we please drop the potty talk?)

The problem is that people started arguing about something that was irrelevant--I could say "orthogonal" to impress you--to my criticism of Bryan Caplan. So let me state it again. Maybe I'm wrong, but none of the critics (in particular Gene Callahan) in the comments of my original post addressed the crucial issue.

There are at least three similar questions revolving around this discussion:

(1) Is there a useful distinction between selfish and altruistic actions? Yes I think there is. Bryan and Gene agree with me.

(2) Do most people exhibit predictably selfish actions in many aspects of life? Yes I think this is probably true, depending on how we define "selfish." (E.g. is it selfish if I would choose to give my newborn one bottle of milk instead of giving three babies in Australia a bottle each?)

(3) To be useful in understanding the world, does economic theory need to assume that people are selfish? I say NO, Bryan says YES, and I'm not sure Gene understood that this was the point I was making in my first post.

For example, it doesn't matter how selfish or altruistic people are, price ceilings (if placed below the market-clearing level) will generate a shortage. Bryan's post would have you believe that this textbook outcome only occurs if people are selfish, but Bryan is wrong (I claim).

Bryan says, "Rent control leads to shortages and/or declining quality - if landlords are selfish. If they loved their tenants as themselves, it's a different story."

I want Bryan (or his defenders) to spell this out a bit. It only makes sense to talk about price controls if there is a market with an equilibrium price in the first place.

I think if Bryan thought it through, he'd end up saying that the supply curve of rental units would be a horizontal line at $0, going over to the right and stopping at the total number of units in existence. But then in that case, the rent ceiling wouldn't be below the equilibrium price.

OK so Bryan says, "Right, that's basically what I meant. The theory could be true technically, but vacuous, in a world where everyone is totally altruistic."

But hold on just a second. What if a parent allows a college dropout to move back home, but charges the kid rent? Does that prove the parent is selfish and actually doesn't love the child?

More generally, what if we have a landlord who does indeed have an upward sloping supply curve, because he is familiar with the Misesian calculation argument and believes property and prices help coordinate the use of material resources? And then he ekes out a very humble existence, and donates the vast bulk of his after-tax income to charities around the world? Is that guy "selfish" and do we conclude that he loves himself more than the tenant whom he charges rent?

I am stressing all this because I think Mises was correct to argue that economic theory is a subset of a theory of human action. I think economic principles do indeed shed light on all human interactions, and don't require an assumption of selfishness in the everyday sense of the word.

I am prepared to debate this; maybe Bryan is right. But his post seemed a bit too quick to me, and I wouldn't want to misunderstand the foundations of our entire discipline because of a hasty mistake.

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I am actually running this post on a Sunday, which is reserved for religious posts, because for a while I have been toying with the idea that the anti-capitalists are right when they deride the "philosophy of scarcity" of bourgeois economists. If everyone really followed the commands of Jesus, it's entirely possible that society would be so incredibly transformed that humans would live on a different plane of existence.

Please don't say, "Even if we had spaceships, there would still be tradeoffs." You're narrowly focusing on technological things here. Imagine if there really were a world in which not only were there no wars and taxes, but there were also no insults or hurt feelings. Ever. The people growing up in such a world wouldn't know what it was like to be excluded from a game of tag, let alone would they know about the draft and fiat money.

I submit that we can barely conceive of what a relative paradise such an existence would be, compared to our current hell--designed by the prince of this world to fulfill his own agenda and unleash as much suffering on us as he can trick us into imposing on each other.

In a world where everyone truly lived as Jesus commanded, it is possible that the writings of free-market economists would seem naive or very limited. However, it's important to note that even in that scenario, it's not that the libertarian tenets would be violated. For example, people wouldn't take from the rich to give to the poor (even though those terms probably wouldn't mean anything at that point); the rich would voluntarily give to the poor.

Remember that "Thou shalt not steal" was in the 10 Commandments, as well as "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods." It's not that Jesus was overturning property rights, He was pushing us beyond them.