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Control or Economic Law
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Economic theory, from its very beginnings, has endeavored to
discover and formulate the laws governing economic behavior. In the early
period, which was under the influence of Rousseau and his doctrines of the
laws of nature, it was customary to apply to these economic laws the name
and character of physical laws. In a literal sense, this characterization was,
of course, open to objection, but possibly the term “physical” or “natural”
laws was intended merely to give expression to the fact that, just as natural
phenomena are governed by immutable eternal laws, quite independent of
human will and human laws, so in the sphere of economics there exist certain
laws against which the will of man, and even the powerful will of the state,
remain impotent; and that the flow of economic forces cannot, by artificial
interference of societal control, be driven out of certain channels into which
it is inevitably pressed by the force of economic laws.
Such a law, among others, was considered to be that of supply and demand,
which again and again had been observed to triumph over the attempts of powerful
governments to render bread cheap in lean years by means of “unnatural”
price regulations, or to confer upon bad money the purchasing power of good
money. And inasmuch as in the last analysis, the remuneration of the great
factors of production—land, labor, and capital—in other words, the distribution
of wealth among the various classes of society, represents merely one case,
although the most important practical case of the general laws of price, the
entire all-important problem of distribution of wealth became dependent upon
the question of whether it was regulated and dominated by natural economic
laws, or by the arbitrary influence of social control
Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk - Personal Name
1st Edition
78-1-933550-71-8
NONE
Control or Economic Law
Economics
English
2009
Canada
1-62
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