Review of the Book

The Basic Facts of Economics
by Louis F. Post

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, September-October 1927]

Louis F. Post has completed a remarkably useful work. Following so soon after his book, What is the Single Tax?, this has been an active year for the veteran whom we delight to honor for his more than fifty years of service in the cause of economic truth.

And now we have from his pen the book we have so long awaited a real primer of political economy. The confusions of the current teachings of the science have done what they could to make it contemptible. The use of money and capital, or land and capital as synonymous terms, the failure to adequately appraise the relations of the human factor, Man, to the passive factor Land, in which term is properly included all natural resources, have made of political economy a hodge-podge which only Lewis Carroll could fitly parody.

This book deals with the fundamentals. After surveying the surface facts of Money and Trade, Mr. Post proceeds to the "basic facts," which are Labor and Land. The student of political economy for whom this book is primarily intended will find himself carried along by easy gradations to correct conclusions, like a child learning to spell, and finally to read the characters, and last of all to determine the meaning of these characters and the lessons that underlie them.

It is Post at his best all the ripened experience of fifty years of unremitting teaching of the simplest yet profoundest of the sciences, is brought to bear on this very successful attempt to dispel the confusions which have grown up around the political economy taught in our colleges and universities.