Economic order

“ Economists argue against government restrictions on trade and manufacture.
The economists wrote treatises on taxation, scattered pamphlets about, and conducted a magazine or two. They not only brought the existing economic evils home to the intelligent reader, but suggested remedies for them. ”

“ Economic conditions require readjustment, important matters of trade must be regulated, vital questions of finance and taxation must be handled, in fact, the whole country must settle down to production, manufacture, distribution of merchandise, and the transaction of the nation’s regular business. ”

“ Political economy requires farther expansion in order to include all the elements of this great social problem.
It is a true doctrine that demand and supply regulate the price of all things, labour included. ”

“ Fair exchange above laws.—Under perfect freedom of exchange, the general law of supply and demand already illustrated is more effective than any laws can be in adjusting wages or profit to efforts in production, and in adjusting interest or rent or both to the capital employed or to other means of production controlled. ”

“ The fundamental basis for the maintenance of national standards of living is adequate production, economical distribution, and fair apportionment among the various economic groups which constitute our society. ”

“ Her economy was not the mean, penny-wise, pound foolish policy which many mistake for true economy. It was the art of calculation joined to the habit of order, and the power of proportioning our wishes to the means of gratifying them. ”

“ Everywhere, in short, within the central area there is a strong tendency to conform to economic standards in the matter of prices, wages, interest, industrial processes, and forms of economic organization. ”

“ In studying the law which would govern economic society if no essential economic changes were taking place,—in reducing society, as it were, to a static state,—we find that there is a certain set of characteristics which land shares with those capital goods which are the products of human industry. ”

“ The common run of political economists confuse these together, under the designation of economic laws, which they deem incapable of being defeated or modified by human effort; ascribing the same necessity to things dependent on the unchangeable conditions of our earthly existence, and to those which, being but the necessary consequences of particular social arrangements, are merely co-extensive with these: given certain institutions and customs, wages, profits, and rent will be determined by certain causes ”

“ The whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country, or, what comes to the same thing, the whole price of that annual produce, naturally divides itself, it has already been observed, into three parts; the rent of land, the wages of labour, and the profits of stock; and constitutes a revenue to three different orders of people; to those who live by rent, to these who live by wages, and to those who live by profit. These are the three great, original, and constituent, orders of every civilized society, from whose revenue that of every other order is ultimately derived. ”

“ Throughout the book economic principles are discussed with special reference to American conditions, and their workings are illustrated by frequent allusions to American experience. The subjects of wealth, its consumption, production, and distribution, exchange, money, credit, bimetallism, monopolies, international trade, wages, land nationalization and socialism, and the economic functions of Government are thus treated ”

“ These economic laws of production are modified by the different stages of this form of production. But generally speaking, the entire period of civilization is dominated by these laws. To this day, the product controls the producer. To this day, the aggregate production of society is managed, not on a uniform plan, but by blind laws, that rule with elementary force and find their final expression in the storms of periodical commercial crises. ”

“ The Economic Function.—The nation has an economic function. It is its business to encourage trade by means that seem most likely to help, whether by subsidies, tariffs, or expert advice; to protect all producers, distributers, and consumers by just laws and tribunals, so that unfair privileges shall not be enjoyed by the few at the expense of the many, and to provide in every legitimate way for the spread of information and for experimentation that agriculture, mining, and manufacturing may be improved. ”

“ Trade had developed under the new rule, and had expanded with improved means of communication. Capital had begun to accumulate, and the moneyed classes were in favour of a government that would support public credit and refrain from extortion. The mass of the people were contented, prices being cheap, wages on the rise and employment brisk. ”

“ Let it practice true and conscientious economy, not only in the expenditure and application of public moneys, but also in the method of levying them, so as to be equally just to all classes and all economical interests. ”

“ Labor is no longer to be classed as an inert commodity to be bought and sold by the law of supply and demand, but the human equation shall hereafter be the commanding force in all agreements between man and capital. ”

“ Under the power to regulate commerce, they assume indefinitely that also over agriculture and manufactures, and call it regulation to take the earnings of one of these branches of industry, and that too the most depressed, and put them into the pockets of the other, the most flourishing of all. ”

“ We have surveyed the field of economical facts, and have examined how they stand related to one another as causes and effects; what circumstances determine the amount of production, of employment for labour, of capital and population; what laws regulate rent, profits, and wages; under what conditions and in what proportions commodities are interchanged between individuals and between countries. We have thus obtained a collective view of the economical phenomena of society, considered as existing simultaneously. ”

“ If we examine, on what the pecuniary value of labour, and the pecuniary value of the use of land, depend, we shall find that it is on the very same causes by which we found that wages and rent would be regulated if there were no money and no exchange of commodities. ”

“ Under the rule of an unrestricted commercial intercourse throughout the world, the principle of supply and demand would control the movements of commerce without the aid of legislation; and, when once fully established, it would give stability and security to production everywhere. The products of the world entering into commerce would localize themselves where they naturally belong—where most could be produced with the least labor; and, population obeying the laws of equalization, would adjust itself to the demands of the respective interests of productive labor. ”

“ If the additional demand could continue to be supplied from the superior lands, by applying additional labour and capital, at no greater proportional cost than that at which they yield the quantity first demanded of them, the owners or farmers of those lands could undersell all others, and engross the whole market. ”

“ Of such cases, the argument to show that Demand for Commodities is not Demand for Labor, the Doctrine of International Values, and the Effect of the Progress of Society on wages, profits, and rent, are examples. ”

“ His abstinence from precept, and even from illustrations drawn from real life, is the more remarkable, as the subject of his treatise is distribution, the most practical branch of Political Economy, and taxation, the most practical branch of distribution.
The modern economists of France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and America, so far as I am acquainted with their works, all treat Political Economy as an art. ”

“ We have investigated the laws which determine the value of two classes of commodities: the small class which, being limited to a definite quantity, have their value entirely determined by demand and supply, save that their cost of production (if they have any) constitutes a minimum below which they cannot permanently fall; and the large class, which can be multiplied ad libitum by labour and capital, and of which the cost of production fixes the maximum as well as the minimum at which they can permanently exchange. ”

“ The state shall coordinate and regulate state-owned economy, co-operative economy, the individual economy of peasants and handicraftsmen, private capitalist economy and state capitalist economy, in their spheres of operations, supply of raw materials, marketing, labour conditions, technical equipment, policies of public and general finance, etc. ”

“ It will be seen that all questions of finance and commerce are intimately connected, while those of labor and capital grow out of the conditions they make possible and inevitable. To properly understand the relations of capital and labor, and to harmonize them, demands a correct comprehension of the basic principles of economy which relate to finance and commerce. ”

“ While the political economists were busy promulgating the doctrine that it was not the province of Government to embark in any enterprise other than that of purely governing—a doctrine precisely suiting the traders and borrowed from their demands—the commercial classes, early in the nineteenth century, suddenly discovered that there was an exception. ”

“ Now, there has been a general social and industrial rearrangement. Production and commerce pay no attention to state lines. The life of the country is no longer grouped about state capitals, but about the great centers of continental production and trade. ”

“ In our endeavors to sustain labor, and equalize its opportunities with capital, we have gone much further than this. We hold that all public necessities of general demand, in the supplying of which large expenditures are required in fixed capital, and which are not strictly in the line of production, should be provided for by the government. ”

“ The labourer may obtain greater comforts; wages in kind real wages may rise. Or the progress of population may force down cultivation to inferior soils, and more costly processes; thus raising the cost of production, the value, and the price, of the chief articles of the labourer's consumption. On either of these suppositions, the rate of profit will fall. ”

“ My countrymen, it is not alone the volume of money which the people want, but they demand its activity in trade and commerce. If you ask me how this can best be accomplished, I will answer by saying, protect American industries and universal confidence will surely follow. ”

“ We have sufficiently considered the difficulties which exist regarding Labour and Capital, two of the requisites of production, and we will now turn to another part of political economy, and inquire into the way in which Land, the third requisite, is supplied. ”

“ These laws are founded upon the natural action of the system of exchange, carrying forward all its operations by the natural action of the great principle of demand and supply. When capital and labour know how to accommodate themselves to the direction of these natural laws, they are in a healthy state with respect to their individual rights, and the rights of industry generally. They are in that state in which each is working to the greatest profit in carrying forward the business of production. ”

“ They would fall, because a less quantity of labour was necessary to their production, and would therefore exchange for a smaller quantity of those things in which no such abridgement of labour had been made.
"Economy in the use of labour never fails to reduce the relative value of a commodity, whether the saving be in the labour necessary to the manufacture of the commodity itself, or in that necessary to the formation of the capital, by the aid of which it is produced. ”

“ Rates of pay, prices, hours of labour, qualities, and kinds of output were all fixed by custom and tradition which often received the sanction of the law of the land. Gradually the market grew and demand became less easy to gauge. ”

“ Twelfth—That while providing revenue for the support of the general government, by duties upon imposts, sound policy requires such an adjustment of these imposts as to encourage the development of the industrial interest of the whole country, and we commend that policy of national exchanges which secures to the workingmen liberal wages, to agriculture remunerating prices, to mechanics and manufacturers an adequate reward for their skill, labor, and enterprise, and to the nation commercial prosperity and independence. ”

“ Means for Saving in the Surplus above Necessaries. The requisites of production being labor, capital, and land, it has been seen from the preceding chapter that the impediments to the increase of production do not arise from the first of these elements. But production has other requisites, and, of these, the one which we shall next consider is Capital. There can not be more people in any country, or in the world, than can be supported from the produce of past labor until that of present labor comes in [although it is not to be supposed that capital consists wholly of food] . ”

“ But mercantile economy, the economy of "merces" or of "pay," signifies the accumulation, in the hands of individuals, of legal, or moral claim upon, or power over, the labour of others; every such claim implying precisely as much poverty or debt on one side, as it implies riches or right on the other. ”