Boom and Bust

Mitchell S. Lurio

[A letter printed by the Christian Science Monitor, 23 July 1976]

How can one dispel the ... assumption that "boom and bust" are the necessary concomitants of the free enterprise system? This illusion is exemplified in your recent "boom without bust" editorial.

We have never had truly free enterprise! Our system is gathering at a faster rate than ever the barnacles of government restriction! regulation and interference.

Yet even if government interference were minimized, there cannot be free enterprise so long as government does not collect what is due it for the services and amenities paid for by taxes levied upon all of us. Since land is not a labor product, but the free gift of nature, land owners who collect rent from land users, own tollgates which enable them to collect what they do not earn as laborers.

It is true that people buy and sell and speculate in these tollgate privileges which on average become more valuable with time.

There would be no violent booms and busts in a genuine free-enterprise-economy because land speculation would be eliminated...

The totalitarian economy has little in the way of boom and bust for it is always at low ebb.

I hope that the Monitor will not assume that the free enterprise system is necessarily a sick one -- that assumption implies that an unfree system is a healthy one.