Abstract

In a series of articles written around the turn of the century, Guido Hülsmann has tried to answer one simple question: “How can we reconcile the idea that there are laws of human action, that manifest themselves in market prices and the structure of production, with the idea that there is also freedom of choice?” (Hülsmann, 2000, p. 48) He has addressed the question most extensively in his “Facts and Counterfactuals in Economic Law” (Hülsmann, 2003), but his distinctive approach is present in several other articles as well (Hülsmann, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2004). Moreover, the first explicit development of this insight is in Hülsmann (1999), in response to Caplan’s elaborate critique of the Austrian methodology, thereby indicating how crucial the issue is to praxeology as an intellectual enterprise, and to that extent to Austrian economics. Mateusz Machaj has commented on the very core of Hülsmann’s proposal (Machaj, 2012). As an epigraph, he chose a quote from Morpheus in The Matrix: “What happened, happened, and couldn’t have happened any other way”—pun intended or not against Hülsmann’s (metaphysical) libertarianism. This paper will briefly present Hülsmann’s main claim, Machaj’s comments, and offer a reply to those comments, further clarifying Hülsmann’s point.