“Free will denial is a cornerstone of materialist–determinist ideology,” wrote Dr. Michael Egnor here in February 2024. The deniers say we are “purely physical machines, meat robots.” Dr. Egnor cited well-known people who have prominently denied humans have free will. Dr. Egnor challenged deniers to demonstrate through their own actions that they truly have no free will. They will fail for Dr. Egnor’s stated reasons, plus one more: economics.

The science of economics describes the behaviors of individual humans as they pursue their lives. Economics has discovered certainties, such as the Law of Supply and Demand, that describe how people produce, consume, trade, save, invest, and anticipate the future. Economics succeeds because it grasps certain universal truths about free-will, non-material, mental processes.

Human Action is All Mental

Every waking moment we humans live out a constant fact underlying all economic science: we act. That means we engage in purposeful behavior. We have an end, i.e., a goal, and we do (or refrain from doing) things in order to achieve that end.

Economics rests upon this foundational truth: humans act to relieve uneasiness. That means seeking to achieve a sense of more satisfaction of our wants than we had previously. It might mean obtaining a physical thing, feeling of status, or sensory pleasure – or it might mean reducing a perceived risk, a sensory discomfort, or a fear. The range of possible ends is limitless. Our ends are personal and internal to each of us and viewed from our own standpoint — they are totally subjective.

Human action is defined simply as purposeful behavior toward an end. Every person’s motive to act is the desire to achieve the end. Built into human action is the person’s choosing one end over all others at that moment in time. It’s assumed – and proved true — that individuals always act in the present toward obtaining their highest valued goal that appears feasible to them.

An individual will act by engaging in behavior he or she believes will get a desired end. The person acts only when the person believes the end is possible to obtain and has plans, resources and methods expected to succeed.

Notably, we humans act when we envision obtaining the end in the future. When acting toward our chosen end, we set aside other ends to use time and resources pursuing the chosen goal.

In his magnum opus, Man, Economy and State, Murray Rothbard summarized these fundamentals underlying economic understanding:

All action involves the employment of scarce means to attain the most valued ends. Man has the choice of using the scarce means for various alternative ends, and the ends that he chooses are the ones he values most highly. The less urgent wants are those that remain unsatisfied. Actors can be interpreted as ranking their ends along a scale of values, or scale of preferences. These scales differ for each person, both in their content and in their orders of preference. Furthermore, they differ for the same individual at different times. 

Everything about economic thinking refers to individuals’ mental operations.

Economic Activity is All Mental

Economics looks at how people operate in transactions, such as in markets. It’s undeniable, for example, that two persons will exchange things when each subjectively values getting the other’s offered thing more than they value what they give for it. Simply stated: In an unforced transaction, both persons subjectively believe they are getting a higher valued item in exchange for giving up a lower valued item. That’s why free market transactions are always, in the estimation of the traders, a win-win. That doesn’t mean the traders are objectively correct or certain about any fact in particular. But no person will freely exchange with another unless that person expects to relieve uneasiness as a result.

The Law of Supply and Demand is unquestionably true, and it flows directly from how people always seek to give up a lesser valued thing in exchange for a greater valued thing. Built into every decision about producing things for sale (supply) and seeking to buy things for sale (demand) are individual human subjective evaluations of what will achieve an end and relieve uneasiness. And each decision to participate in exchange is aiming for a desired outcome in the future. All of these elements are non-material activities in human minds.

Physics and Chemistry Don’t Drive Economic Activity

When free will deniers assert that all human thought results from mass and energy interacting as in physics and chemistry, they smash against the wall of economic science. The concept of “uneasiness” is immaterial — not matter and energy. Human action arises from individual minds aiming to relieve uneasiness in the future by choosing an end and a course of action to achieve it. Chemistry and physics don’t choose goals and make plans.

Moreover, humans buy and sell products and services because they value the received thing greater than the thing given away. Chemistry and physics, however, lack any concept of subjective “value.” As Ludwig von Mises wrote in his seminal work, Human Action, human value judgments are primaries:

Concrete value judgments and definite human actions are not open to further analysis. … Reason and experience show us two separate realms: [1] the external world of physical, chemical, and physiological phenomena, and [2] the internal world of thought, feeling, valuation, and purposeful action. No bridge connects — as far as we can see today — these two spheres.

Economics reliably describes how individuals alone and in society act to relieve their personal uneasiness, i.e., select their most urgent ends and take steps to achieve them. The Law of Supply and Demand, for example, predicts that as the price of a given commodity increases, people will generally buy less of it and will look for substitutes for that commodity to buy instead. Each individual buyer makes a personal calculation, so some will still buy the higher priced item while others won’t. Every such decision involves a private subjective evaluation of how urgently the person wants the commodity compared to other commodities, and how urgently the person wants one uneasiness to be relieved instead of another.

Choosing which wants are more urgent and which things can be traded away are personal subjective decisions. Yet the Law of Supply and Demand is true because people act “economically” — not randomly. Physics and chemistry do not explain why all humans uniformly operate with the logic that economics has found true. Indeed, economics has shown tendencies so solid that we can bank on them, while always recognizing the individuals do not make identical decisions. And that is because each individual has different sources of uneasiness and different visions about how to relieve it.

Economics flows from understanding how individuals act to relieve uneasiness. It assumes individuals make their own decisions. Without free will, economics would not describe human decisions — it would describe how some external controlling force directs human action. Economists don’t assume an outside controller directs all value decisions and transactions. To prevail, free will deniers must by logic or actions disprove the foundations of all economic science.