Economics as Taught Today

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, November-December 1937]

Joseph Dana Miller was during this period Editor of Land and Freedom. Many of the editorials published were unsigned. It is therefore possible that Miller was not the author of this article, although the content is thought to be consistent with his own perspectives as Editor.

There is no end of the explanations given by college professors and so-called economists for poverty and depressions. These range from overproduction to sun spots. But there is a school of economic atheists who have a blasphemy all their own. They reject all explanations and abandon the problem with the synthesis that poverty and depressions are due to the ordering of an Unwise Providence. Therefore nothing can be done about it. Providence is just plain stupid.

This nihilistic philosophy dispenses with any hard thinking. There is still room for speculation about business cycles in which we are to look for depressions as regularly occurring due to the blundering of a purblind God who has forgotten all about His creation and His creatures. It is true that other matters move in obedience to His laws, and one shudders to think what would happen if the movements of planets that are ordered so perfectly should get out of hand owing to a like forgetfullness or incompetence of a careless Creator.

It never occurs to these economic atheists that there may be natural laws in the constitution of society which will bring about the same harmony we observe in the siderial heavens, that poverty and depressions are man-created and are the results of human maladjustments. No wonder the world has lost faith. No wonder that it relapses into the hopelessness of Lessings despairing cry: "We are all orphans, you and I we have no Father."

The assumption that there are no natural laws in society to which legislation must conform is responsible for the "planning" which not only blinds us to the problem but actually makes matters worse. For to impose these cumbersome provisions in the free movement of society is to interrupt these natural laws of production and distribution which conserve the welfare of the individual.

The law of unconscious cooperation. There is nothing really valuable in society that is not the property of the unit. The purposes the individual pursues in gratifying his desires with the least exertion yield their result to the mass. Yet the hope of legislation lives eternal in the human breast, notwithstanding that the breaking down of manhood of self-reliant selfhood eventually comes to man in the process of having things done for him.

Think of the individual. What is he? A mass of mingled feelings and perceptions, of wants and desires, of instincts and impulses, all serving in various ways his own gratification and that of others. His principle motives urging him to action are beneficiently fruitful of results for the general good. When he competes he cooperates. When he fells a tree, or builds a house, or plants a seed, be he the veriest miser, the sum of human gratification is increased. And the leaving him free to do this for man is a social animal and not "a creature red in tooth and claw" is responsible for the nicety with which the complicated social machinery has been put together, and the smoothness with which, when let alone, its myriad appliances revolve.

Now think of the State. What is it? A delegated function, without soul, feeling, thought a mere apparatus. If the individual fail in intelligence, how shall he deputize intelligence in the state which is an artificial arm of society, and not society itself. How shall the state, soulless, emotional, passionless, succeed where the individual has failed?

Human beings are a sort of divine automata. Though each individual works for himself all are under the want of adaptiveness in the state its slow intelligence, the absence of prompt cognizance of improvements in production of labor saving devices, notoriously exhibited in every official department, mark the inferiority of its service. The influence of mechanical routine makes it passive, slow, over-cautious in everything but resistance to change. The state is without self-interest, therefore the most important spring of action has been removed. "The insolence of office" is no more flagrant than its delays which spring from the confidence in the security of its existence. A private concern has no such security; it must serve well or die.

The lover of freedom fleeing from tyranny may make his flight through the door of socialism, because it seems to offer escape. But the constructive statesman, conferring face to face with freedom, will cast no longing eye that way. A free people will not if they know and love freedom consent to blind themselves with even silken shackles. Men do love freedom blunderingly, it is true and not with the clearest vision. Let it be shown to them and they will rally to her. Let her voice be clearly heard and the song of the socialistic siren will charm in vain.

If our readers will permit a further digression in this somewhat rambling discussion, it should be said that political economy as taught has missed no absurdity tending to confuse the essential truths. A glance at the history of the so-called Wage Fund Theory may be of interest. The theory held that wages depend on the relative amount of capital set aside for payment of wages and that wages are high as the amount is high or the numbers to draw upon it are small. For a refutation of this theory our readers are referred to Progress and Poverty.

The Wages Fund Theory is attributed to James Mill, father of John Stuart Mill. The son embraced the theory but later abandoned it and exposed its fallacy. The most elaborate attack upon it was made by Francis Walker. Following John Stuart Mill's capitulation the theory ceased to influence economic thought. But nevertheless the notion that is inherent in the Wages Fund Theory pops up in different forms in current teaching.