Taxation, as we have seen, takes from producers and gives to others. Any increase in taxation swells the resources, the incomes, and usually the numbers of those living off the producers, while diminishing the production base from which these others are drawing their sustenance. Clearly, this is eventually a self-defeating process: there is a limit beyond which the top-heavy burden can no longer be carried by the diminishing stock of producers. Narrower limits are also imposed by the disincentive effects of taxation. The greater the amount of taxes imposed on the producers—the taxpayers—the lower the marginal utility of work will be, for the returns from work are forcibly diminished, and the greater the marginal utility of leisure forgone. Not only that: the greater will be the incentive to shift from the ranks of the burdened taxpayers to the ranks of the tax-consumers, either as full-time bureaucrats or as those subsidized by the government. As a result, production will diminish even further, as people retreat to leisure or scramble harder to join the ranks of the privileged tax-consumers.34 In the market economy, net incomes are derived from wages, interest, ground rents, and profit; and in so far as taxes strike at the earnings from these sources, attempts to earn these incomes will diminish. The laborer, faced with a tax on his wages, has less incentive to work hard; the capitalist, confronting a tax on his interest or profit return, has more incentive to consume rather than to save and invest. The landlord, a tax being imposed on his rents, will have less of a spur to allocate land sites efficiently.

It has been objected that since a man’s marginal utility of money assets increases as he holds less of a stock of money, lower money income will mean an increased marginal utility of income. As a result, a tax on money incomes creates both a “substitution effect” against work and in favor of leisure (or against saving in favor of consumption) and an “income effect” working in the opposite direction. This is true, and in rare empirical cases, the latter effect will predominate. In plain language, this means that when extra penalties are placed upon man’s efforts he will generally slacken them; but in some cases, he will work harder to try to offset the burdens. In the latter cases, however, we must remember that he will lose the valuable consumption good of “leisure”; he will have less leisure now than he would have if his choices were still free. Working harder under penalty is only a cause for rejoicing if we regard the matter exclusively from the point of view of those living off the producers, who will thereby benefit from the tax. The standard of living of the workers, which must include leisure, has fallen.

The income tax, by taxing income from investments, cripples saving and investment, since it lowers the return from investing below what free-market time preferences would dictate. The lower net interest return leads people to bring their savings-investment into line with the new realities; in short, the marginal savings and investments at the higher return will now be valued below consumption and will no longer be made.

There is another, unheralded reason why an income tax will particularly penalize saving and investment as against consumption. It might be thought that since the income tax confiscates a certain portion of a man’s income and leaves him free to allocate the rest between consumption and investment, and since time preference schedules remain given, the proportion of consumption to saving will remain unchanged. But this ignores the fact that the taxpayer’s real income and the real value of his monetary assets have been lowered by paying the tax. We have seen in chapter 6 that, given a man’s time-preference schedule, the lower the level of his real monetary assets, the higher his time-preference rate will be, and therefore the higher the proportion of his consumption to investment. The taxpayer’s position may be seen in Figure 86, which is essentially the reverse of the individual time-market diagrams in chapter 6. In the present case, money assets are increasing as we go rightward on the horizontal axis, while in chapter 6 money assets were declining. Let us say that the taxpayer’s initial position is a money stock of 0M; tt is his given time-preference curve. His effective time-preference rate, determining his consumption/investment proportion, is t1. Now, suppose that the government levies an income tax, reducing his initial monetary assets at the start of his spending period to 0M′. His effective time-preference rate, the intersection of tt and the M′ line, is now higher at t2. He shifts to a higher proportion of consumption and a lower proportion of saving and investment.35

We have now seen two reasons why an income tax will shift the social proportion toward more consumption and less saving and investment. It might be objected that the time-preference reason is invalid, since the government officials and the people they subsidize will receive the tax revenues and find that their money stock has increased just as that of the taxpayers has declined. We shall see below, however, that no truly productive savings and investments can be made by government, its employees, or the recipients of its subsidies.

Some economists maintain that income taxation reduces savings and investment in society in yet a third way. They assert that income taxation, by its very nature, imposes a “double” tax on savings-investment as against consumption.36 The reasoning runs as follows: Saving and consumption are really not symmetrical. All saving is directed toward enjoying more consumption in the future; otherwise, there would be no point at all to saving. Saving is abstaining from possible present consumption in return for the expectation of increased consumption at some time in the future. No one wants capital goods for their own sake. They are only the embodiment of increased consumption in the future. Saving-investment is Crusoe’s building the stick to obtain more apples at a future date; it fructifies in higher consumption later. Hence, the imposition of an income tax is a “double” tax on consumption, and excessively penalizes saving and investment.37

This line of reasoning correctly explains the investment-consumption process. It suffers, however, from a grave defect: it is irrelevant to problems of taxation. It is true that saving is a fructifying agent. But the point is that everyone knows this; that is precisely why people save. Yet, even though they know that saving is a fructifying agent, they do not save all their income. Why? Because of their time preferences for present consumption. Every individual, given his current income and value scales, allocates that income in the most desirable proportions between consumption, investment, and additions to his cash balance. Any other allocation would satisfy his desires less well and lower his position on his value scale. The fructifying power of saving is already taken into account when he makes his allocation. There is therefore no reason to say that an income tax doubly penalizes saving-investment; it penalizes the individual’s entire standard of living, encompassing present consumption, future consumption, and his cash balance. It does not per se penalize saving any more than the other avenues of income allocation.

This Fisher argument reflects a curious tendency among economists devoted to the free market to be far more concerned about governmental measures penalizing saving and investment than they are about measures hobbling consumption. Surely an economist favoring the free market must grant that the market’s voluntary consumption/investment allocations are optimal and that any government interference in this proportion, from either direction, is distortive of that market and of production to meet the wants of the consumers. There is nothing, after all, particularly sacred about savings; they are simply the road to future consumption. But they are, then, clearly no more important than present consumption, the allocations between the two being determined by the time preferences of all individuals. The economist who balks more at interference with free-market savings than he does at infringement on free-market consumption is therefore implicitly advocating statist interference in the opposite direction. He is implicitly calling for a coerced distortion of resources to lower consumption and increase investment.38

• 34In the less developed countries, where a money economy is still emerging from barter, any given amount of taxation will have a still more drastic effect: for it will make monetary incomes much less worthwhile and will shift people’s efforts from trying to make money back to untaxed barter arrangements. Taxation can therefore decisively retard development from a barter to a monetary economy, or even reverse the process. See C. Lowell Harriss, “Public Finance” in Bernard F. Haley, ed., A Survey of Contemporary Economics (Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin, 1952), p. 264. For a practical application, see P.T. Bauer, “The Economic Development of Nigeria,” Journal of Political Economy, October, 1955, pp. 400 ff.
  If any government taxes in kind, there is then no span of time between taxation and the extraction of physical resources from the private sector. Both take place in the same act.
• 35For this shift to occur, the individual’s real monetary assets must decline, not just the nominal amount in terms of money. If, then, instead of this tax, there is deflation in the society, and the value of the monetary unit increases roughly proportionately everywhere, then the nominal fall in each individual’s money stock will not be a real fall, and hence effective time-preference ratios will remain unchanged. In the case of income taxation, deflation will not occur, since the government will spend the revenue rather than contract the money supply. (Even in the rare case where all the tax money is liquidated by the government, the individuals taxed will lose more than others and hence will lose some real monetary assets.)
• 36Thus, cf. Irving and Herbert W. Fisher, Constructive Income Taxation (New York: Harper & Bros., 1942). “Double” is used in the sense of two instances, not arithmetically twice.
• 37These economists generally conclude that not income, but only consumption, should be taxed as the only “real” income.
• 38The bias in favor of investment, or “growth,” as against present consumption, is similar to the conservationist attack on present consumption. What is so worthy about future consumption and so unworthy about consuming in the present? Perhaps what we have here is an illicit smuggling of the less rational aspects of the “Protestant ethic” into economic science. Of the many problems involved, we may mention one here: What nonarbitrary quantitative standards for thrift can the economist establish once the free market’s decision is overridden?

So far, we have discussed the impact of a tax on an individual considered by himself. Equally important is the distortion of the market’s pattern of factor prices and incomes, created by the way taxes bear down upon different people. The free market determines an intricate, almost infinite array and structure of prices, rates, and incomes. The imposition of different taxes disrupts these patterns and cripples the market’s work of allocating resources and output. Thus, if firm A pays $5,000 a year for a certain type of labor, and firm B pays $3,000, laborers will tend to shift from B to A and thereby more efficiently serve the wants of consumers. But if the income earned at firm A is taxed $2,000 per annum, while income at B is taxed negligibly or not at all, the market inducement to move from B to A will totally or virtually disappear, perpetuating a misallocation of productive resources and hampering the growth and even the existence of firm A.

We have seen above that the quest for a neutral tax—a tax neutral to the market, leaving the market roughly as it was before the tax was imposed—is a hopeless venture. For there can be no uniformity in paying taxes when some people in society are necessarily taxpayers, while others are privileged tax-consumers. But even if we disregard these objections and fail to consider the redistributionist effects of government spending out of tax revenues, we cannot arrive at a system of neutral taxation.39 Many writers have maintained that uniformly proportional income taxes for all would yield a neutral tax; for then, the relative ratios of incomes in society would remain the same as before. Thus, if A received $6,000 a year, B earned $3,000, and C $2,000, a 10-percent tax on each man would yield a “distribution” of: A, $5,400; B, $2,700; C, $1,800—the same mutual ratios as before. (This assumes, of course, no disincentive effects of the tax on the various individuals or, rather, equiproportional disincentive effects on each individual in the society—a most unlikely occurrence.) But the trouble is that this “solution” misconceives the nature of what a neutral tax would have to be. For a tax truly neutral to the free market would not be one that left income patterns the same as before; it would be a tax which would affect the income pattern, and all other aspects of the economy, in the same way as if the tax were really a free-market price.

This is a very important correction; for we must surely realize that when a service is sold at a certain price on the free market, this sale emphatically does not leave income “distribution” the same as before. For, normally, market prices are not proportional to each man’s income or wealth, but are uniform in the sense of equal to everyone, regardless of his income or wealth or even his eagerness for the product. A loaf of bread does not cost a multimillionaire a thousand times as much as it costs the average man. If, indeed, the market really behaved in this way, there would soon be no market, for there would be no advantage whatever in earning money. The more money one earned, the more, pari passu, the price of every good would be raised to him. Therefore, the entire civilized money economy and the system of production and division of labor based upon it would break down. Far from being “neutral” to the free market, then, a proportional income tax follows a principle which, if consistently applied, would eradicate the market economy and the entire monetary economy itself.

It is clear, then, that equal taxation of everyone—the so-called “head tax” or “poll tax”—would be a far closer approach to the goal of neutrality. But even here, there are serious flaws in its neutrality, entirely apart from the ineluctable taxpayer–tax-consumer dichotomy. For one thing, goods and services on the free market are purchased only by those freely willing to obtain them at the market price. Since a tax is a compulsory levy rather than a free purchase, it can never be assumed that each and every member of society would, in a free market, pay this equal sum to the government. In fact, the very compulsory nature of taxation implies that far less revenue would be paid in to the government were it conducted in a voluntary manner. Rather than being neutral, therefore, the equal tax would distort market results by imposing undue levies on at least three groups of citizens: the poor, the uninterested, and the hostile, i.e., those who, for one reason or another, would not have voluntarily paid these equal sums to the government.

Another grave problem in treating the equal tax as akin to a free-market price is that we do not know what “services” of government the people are supposed to be “purchasing.” For example, if the government uses the tax to subsidize a certain favored group, it is difficult to know what sort of “service” the payers of the head tax are reaping from this act of government. But let us take a seemingly clear-cut case of pure service, police protection, and let us assume that the head tax is being paid for this expenditure. The free-market rule is that equal prices are paid for equal services; but what, here, is an “equal service”? Surely, the service of police protection is of far greater magnitude in an urban crime center than it is in some sleepy backwater, where crime is rare. Police protection will certainly cost more in the crime-ridden area; hence, if it were supplied on the market, the price paid there would be higher than in the backwater. Furthermore, a person under particular threat of crime, and who might require greater surveillance, would have to pay a higher police fee. A uniform tax would be below market price in the dangerous areas and above it in the peaceful areas. To approach neutrality, then, a tax would have to vary in accordance with the costs of services and not be uniform.40 This is the neglected cost principle of taxation.

The cost principle, however, is hardly neutral either. Apart from the inexorable taxpayer–tax-consumer problem, there is, again, the problem of how a “service” is to be defined and isolated. What is the “service” of redistribution from Peter to Paul, and what is the “cost” for which Peter is to be assessed? And even if we confine the discussion to such common services as police protection, there are grave flaws. In the first place, the costs of government, as we shall see further below, are bound to be much higher than those of the free market. Secondly, the State cannot calculate well and therefore cannot gauge its costs accurately. Thirdly, costs are equal to prices only in equilibrium; since the economy is never in equilibrium, costs are never a precise estimate of what the free-market price would have been. And finally, as in the equal tax, and in contrast to the free market, the taxpayer never demonstrates his benefit from the governmental act; it is simply and blithely assumed that he would have purchased the service voluntarily at this price.

Still another attempt at neutral taxation is the benefit principle, which states that a tax should be levied equal to the benefit which the individuals receive from the government service. It is not always realized what this principle would mean: e.g., that recipients of welfare benefits would have to pay the full costs of these benefits. Each recipient of government welfare would then have to pay more than he received, for he would also have to pay the “handling” costs of government bureaucracy. Obviously, there would be no such welfare or any other subsidy payments if the benefit principle were maintained. Even if we again confine the discussion to services like police protection, grave flaws still remain. Let us again disregard the persistent taxpayer–tax-consumer dichotomy. A fatal problem is that we cannot measure benefits or even know whether they exist. As in the head tax and cost principles, there is here no free market where people can demonstrate that they are receiving a benefit from the exchange greater than the value of the goods they surrender. In fact, since taxes are levied by coercion, it is clear that people’s benefits from government are considerably less than the amount that they are required to pay, since, if left free, they would contribute less to government. The “benefit,” then, is simply assumed arbitrarily by government officials.

Furthermore, even if the benefit were freely demonstrable, the benefit principle would not approach the process of the free market. For, once again, individuals pay a uniform price for services on the free market, regardless of the extent of their subjective benefits. The man who would “walk a mile for a Camel” pays no more, ordinarily, than the man who couldn’t care less. To tax everyone in accordance with the benefit he receives, then, is diametrically opposed to the market principle. Finally, if everyone’s benefit is taxed away, there would be no reason for him to make the exchange or to receive the government service. On the market, not all people, not even the marginal buyers, pay the full amount of their benefit. The supramarginal buyers obtain unmeasurable surplus benefit, and so do the marginal buyers, for without such a surplus they would not buy the product. Moreover, for such services as police protection, the benefit principle would require the poor and the infirm to pay more than the rich and the able, since the former may be said to benefit more from protection. Finally, it should be noted that if each person’s benefit from government is to be taxed away, the bureaucrats, who receive all their income from the government, would have to return their whole salary to the government and so serve without pay.41

We have thus seen that no principle of taxation can be neutral with respect to the free market. Progressive taxation, where each man pays more than proportionately to his income, of course makes no attempt at neutrality. If the proportional tax embodies a principle destructive to the entire market economy and the monetary economy itself, then the progressive tax does so still more. For the progressive tax penalizes the able and efficient in even greater proportion than their relative ability and efficiency. Progressive rates are a particular disincentive against especially able work or entrepreneurship. And since such ability is engaged in serving the consumer, a progressive tax levies a particular burden on the consumers as well.

In addition to the two ways discussed above by which income taxation penalizes saving, the progressive tax imposes an added penalty. For empirically, in most cases, the wealthy save and invest proportionately more of their incomes than the lower-income groups. There is, however, no apodictic, praxeological reason why this must always be so. The rule would not hold, for example, in a country where the wealthy bought jewelry while the poor thriftily saved and invested.

While the progressive principle is certainly highly destructive of the market, most conservative, pro-free-market economists tend to overweigh its effects and to underweigh the destructive effects of proportional taxation. Proportional income taxation has many of the same consequences, and therefore the level of income taxation is generally more important for the market than the degree of progressivity. Thus, society A may have a proportional income tax requiring every man to pay 50 percent of his income; society B may have a very steeply progressive tax requiring a poor man to pay 1/4 percent and the richest man 10 percent of his income. The rich man will certainly prefer society B, even though the tax is progressive—demonstrating that it is not so much the progressivity as the height of his tax that burdens the rich man.

Incidentally, the poor producer, with a lower tax upon him, will also prefer society B. This demonstrates the fallacy in the common conservative complaint against progressive taxation that it is a means “for the poor to rob the rich.” For both the poor man and the rich man have, in our example, chosen progression! The reason is that the “poor” do not “rob the rich” under progressive taxation. Instead, it is the State that “robs” both through taxation, whether proportional or progressive.

It may be objected that the poor benefit from the State’s expenditures and subsidies from the tax proceeds and thus do their “robbing” indirectly. But this overlooks the fact that the State can spend its money in many different ways: it may consume the products of specific industries; it may subsidize some or all of the rich; it may subsidize some or all of the poor. The fact of progressivity does not in itself imply that the “poor” are being subsidized en masse. Indeed, if some of the poor are being subsidized, others will probably not be, and so these latter net taxpayers will be “robbed” along with the rich. In fact, since there are usually far more poor than rich, the poor en masse may very well bear the greatest burden of even a progressive tax system.

Of all the possible types of taxes, the one most calculated to cripple and destroy the workings of the market is the excess profits tax. For of all productive incomes, profits are a relatively small sum with enormous significance and impact; they are the motor, the driving force, of the entire market economy. Profit-and-loss signals are the prompters of the entrepreneurs and capitalists who direct and ever redirect the productive resources of society in the best possible ways and combinations to satisfy the changing desires of consumers under changing conditions. With the drive for profit crippled, profit and loss no longer serve as an effective incentive, or, therefore, as the means for economic calculation in the market economy.

It is curious that in wartime, precisely when it would seem most urgent to preserve an efficient productive system, the cry invariably goes up for “taking the profits out of war.” This zeal never seems to apply so harshly to the clearly war-borne “profits” of steel workers in higher wages—only to the profits of entrepreneurs. There is certainly no better way of crippling a war effort. In addition, the “excess” concept requires some sort of norm above which the profit can be taxed. This norm may either be a certain rate of profit, which involves the numerous difficulties of measuring profit and capital investment in every firm; or it may refer to profits at a base period before the war started. The latter, the general favorite because it specifically taps war profits, makes the economy even more chaotic. For it means that while the government strains for more war production, the excess profits tax creates every incentive toward lower and inefficient war production. In short, the EPT tends to freeze the process of production as of the peacetime base period. And the longer the war lasts, the more obsolete, the more inefficient and absurd, the base-period structure becomes.

• 39This is true if we also disregard the grave conceptual difficulties of arriving at a definition of “income,” in accounting for the imputed monetary value of work done within a household, of averaging fluctuating incomes over various years, etc.
• 40We are not here conceding that “costs” determine “prices.” The general array of final prices determines the general array of cost prices, but then the viability of firms is determined by whether the price that people will pay for their particular products will be enough to cover the costs, which are determined throughout the market.
• 41Ever since Adam Smith, economists have tried, fallaciously, to use the benefit principle to justify proportional, and even progressive, taxation, on the ground that people benefit “from society” in proportion, or even more than in proportion, to their incomes. But it is clear that the rich benefit less from such services as police protection, since they could more afford to pay for their own than the poor. And the rich derive no benefit from welfare expenditures. Therefore, the rich derive fewer benefits, absolutely, from government than the poor, and the benefit principle cannot be used to justify proportional or progressive taxation.
       But, it might be objected, can’t we say that everyone derives proportional benefits to his income from “society,” though not from government? In the first place, this cannot be established. In fact, the opposite argument would be more accurate: for since both A and B participate in society and its benefits, any differential income between A and B must be due to their own particular worths rather than to society. Certainly equal benefits from society cannot be used to imply a proportional tax. And, furthermore, even if the argument were true, by what legerdemain can we say that “society” is equivalent to the State ? If A, B, C, producers on the market, benefit from each other’s existence as “society,” how can G, the government, use this fact to establish its claim to their wealth?

No discussion of taxation, however brief, can overlook the famous problem of “the shifting and incidence” of taxation. In brief, who pays a tax? The person on whom it is levied, or someone else to whom the former is able to “shift” the tax? There are still economists, incredibly, who hew to the old nineteenth-century “equal diffusion” theory of taxation, which simply closes the problem by proclaiming that “all taxes are shifted to everyone,” so that there is no need to analyze each one in particular.42 This obscurantist tendency is fostered by treating “shifting” in too broad a way. Thus, if an income tax is levied on Jones at 80 percent, this will hurt not only Jones, but also—by decreasing Jones’ incentives as well as capacities—other consumers by reducing Jones’ work and savings. It is therefore true that the effects of taxation diffuse outward from the center of the target. But this is far from saying that Jones can simply shift the tax burden onto the shoulders of others. The concept of “shifting” will here be limited to the case where the payment of a tax can be directly transferred from the original payer to someone else, and will not be used when others suffer in addition to the original taxpayer. The latter may be called the “indirect effects” of the tax.

The first rule of shifting is that an income tax cannot be shifted. This formerly accepted truth in economics is now countered with the popular assumption that, for example, a tax on wages will spur unions to demand higher wages to compensate for the tax, and that therefore the tax on wages is shifted “forward” onto the employer, who, in turn, shifts it again forward onto the body of consumers. And yet almost every step in this commonly proclaimed sequence is an egregious fallacy. It is absurd, in the first place, to think that workers or unions wait quietly for a tax to galvanize them into making demands. Workers always want higher wages; unions always demand more. The question is: Will they get more? There is no reason to think that they can. A worker can get only the value of the discounted marginal productivity of his labor. No clamor will raise that productivity, and therefore none can raise the wage he earns from his employer. Union demands for higher wages will be treated as usual, i.e., they can be satisfied only at the cost of the unemployment of some of the work force in that industry. But this is true whether or not there has been a tax on wages; the tax will have nothing to do with the final wage set on the market.

The idea that the increased cost will be passed on to the consumer by the employer is an illustration of perhaps the single most widespread fallacy on taxation: that businessmen can simply shift their higher costs forward onto the consumers in the form of higher prices. All the economic theory expounded in this book shows the error of this doctrine. For the price of a given product is set by the demand schedules of the consumers. There is nothing in higher costs or higher taxes which, per se, increases these schedules; hence, any change in selling prices, whether higher or lower, will decrease the revenues of the business involved. For each business, on the market, tends to be, at all times, at its “maximum profit point” in relation to the consumers. Prices are already at their point of maximum return for the business; therefore, higher taxes or other costs imposed on the firm will reduce their net incomes rather than be smoothly and easily passed on to consumers. We thus arrive at this significant conclusion: no tax (not just an income tax) can ever be shifted forward.

Suppose that a particularly heavy tax—of whatever type—has been laid on a specific industry: say the liquor industry. What will be the effects? As we have noted, the tax will not simply be “passed on” to the consumers.43 Instead, the price of liquor will remain the same; the net income of the firms will decline. This will mean that returns will be lower to capital and enterprise in liquor than in other industries of the economy; marginal liquor firms will suffer losses and go out of business; and, in general, productive resources of all types will flow out of liquor and into other industries. The long-run effect, therefore, is to decrease the supply of liquor produced, and therefore, by the law of supply and demand, to raise the price of liquor on the market. However, as we have said above, this process—this diffusion of suffering over the economy—is hardly “shifting.” For the tax is not simply “passed on”; it only permeates to the consumers through hurting the industry taxed. The final result will be a distortion of the factors of production; fewer goods are now being produced than the consumers would prefer in the liquor industry; and too many goods, relatively to liquor, are being produced in the other industry.

Taxes, in short, can more readily be “shifted backward” than forward. Strictly, the result is not shifting because it is not a painless process. But it is clear that the backward process (backward to the factors of production) happens more quickly and directly than the effects on consumers. For losses or lowered profits to liquor firms will immediately lower their demand for land, labor, and capital factors of production; this falling of demand schedules will lower wages and rents earned in the liquor industry; and these lower earnings will induce a shift of labor, land and capital out of liquor and into other industries. The rapid “backward-shifting” is in harmony with the “Austrian” theory of consumption and production developed in this volume; for prices of factors are determined by the selling prices of the goods which they produce, and not vice versa (which would have to be the conclusion of the naive “shifting-forward” doctrine).

It should be noted that, in some cases, the industry itself can welcome a tax upon it, for the sake of conferring an indirect, but effective, monopolistic privilege on the supramarginal firms. Thus, a flat “license” tax will confer a particular privilege on the more heavily capitalized firms, which can more easily afford to pay the fee.

• 42For a critique of this doctrine, see E.R.A. Seligman, The Shifting and Incidence of Taxation (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1899), pp. 122–36.
• 43Businessmen are particularly prone to this “passing on” argument—obviously in an attempt to convince consumers that they are really paying any tax on that industry. Yet the argument is clearly belied by the very zeal of each industry to have its taxes lowered and to fight against a tax increase. If taxes could really be shifted so easily and businessmen were simply unpaid collection agents for the government, they would never protest a tax on their industry. (Perhaps this is the reason why almost no businessmen have protested being collection agents for withholding taxes on their workers!)

The most popular example of a tax supposedly shifted forward is the general sales tax. Surely, for example, if the government imposes a uniform 20-percent tax on all retail sales, and if we can make the simplifying assumption that the tax can be equally well enforced everywhere, then business will simply “pass on” the 20-percent increase in all prices to consumers. In fact, however, there is no way for prices to increase at all! As in the case of one particular industry, prices were previously set, or approximately so, at the points of maximum net revenue for the firms. Stocks of goods or factors have not yet changed, and neither have demand schedules. How then could prices rise? Moreover, if we look at the general array of prices, as is proper when dealing with a general sales tax, these are determined by the supply of and the demand for money, from the goods and money sides. For the general array of prices to rise, there must be either an increase in the supply of money, a decrease in the demand schedule for money, or both. Nothing in a general sales tax causes a change in either of these determinants.44

Furthermore, the long-run effects of a general sales tax on prices will be smaller than in the case of an equivalent partial excise tax. A tax on a specific industry, such as liquor, will push resources out of this industry and into others, and therefore the relative price of the taxed commodity will eventually rise. In a general, uniformly enforced sales tax, however, there is no room for such shifts of resources.45

The myth that a sales tax can be shifted forward is comparable to the myth that a general union-imposed wage increase can be shifted forward to higher prices for consumers, thereby “causing inflation.” There is here no way that the general array of prices can rise, and the only possible result of such a wage increase is mass unemployment.46

In considering the general sales tax, many people are misled by the fact that the price paid by the consumer necessarily includes the tax. If someone goes to a movie and pays $1.00 admission, and if he sees prominently posted the information that this covers a “price” of 85¢ and a tax of 15¢, he tends to conclude that the tax has simply been added on to the “price.” But $1.00 is the price, not 85¢, the latter sum simply being the revenue accruing to the firm after taxes. The revenue to the firm has, in effect, been reduced to allow for payment of taxes.

This is precisely the consequence of a general sales tax. Its immediate impact lowers the gross revenue of firms by the amount of the tax. In the long run, of course, firms cannot pay the tax, the loss in gross revenue of firms being imputed backward to interest income by capitalists and to wages and rents earned by owners of original factors—labor and ground land. A decrease in gross revenue to retail firms is reflected back to a decreased demand for the products of all the higher-order firms. The major result of a general sales tax is a general reduction in the net revenues accruing to original factors. The sales tax has been shifted backwards to original factor returns—to interest and to all wages and ground rents. No longer does every original factor of production earn its discounted marginal product. Original factors now earn less than their DMVPs, the reduction consisting of the sales tax paid to the government.

Let us now integrate this analysis of the incidence of a general sales tax with our previous general analysis of the benefits and burdens of taxation. This is accomplished by remembering that the proceeds of taxation are, in turn, spent by the government. Whether or not the government spends the money for resources for its own activities or simply transfers the money to people it subsidizes, the effect is to shift consumption and investment demand from private hands to the government or to government-supported individuals, by the amount of the tax revenue. The tax has been ultimately levied on the incomes of original factors, and the money transferred from their hands to the government. The income of the government and of those subsidized by the government has been increased at the expense of the tax producers, and therefore consumption and investment demands on the market have been shifted from the producers to the expropriators by the amount of the tax. As a consequence, the value of the monetary unit will remain unchanged (barring a difference in demands for money between the taxpayers and the tax-consumers), but the array of prices will shift in accordance with the shift in demands. Thus, if the market has been spending heavily on clothing, and the government uses the revenue mostly for the purchase of arms, there will be a fall in the price of clothes and a rise in the price of arms, and a tendency for nonspecific factors to shift out of the production of clothing and into the production of armaments.

As a result, there will not finally be, as might be assumed, a proportional 20-percent fall in all original factor incomes as the result of a 20-percent general sales tax. Specific factors in industries that have lost business from the shift from private to governmental demand will lose proportionately more in income; specific factors in industries gaining in demand will lose proportionately less—some may gain so much as to gain absolutely from the change. Nonspecific factors will not be affected as much proportionately, but they too will lose and gain according to the difference that the concrete shift in demand makes in their marginal value productivity.

It should be carefully noted that the general sales tax is a conspicuous example of failure to tax consumption. The sales tax is commonly supposed to penalize consumption, rather than income or capital. Yet we find that the sales tax reduces, not just consumption, but the incomes of original factors. The general sales tax is therefore an income tax, albeit a rather haphazard one. Many “right-wing” economists have advocated general sales taxation, as opposed to income taxation, on the grounds that the former taxes consumption but not savings-investment; many “left-wing” economists have opposed sales taxation for the same reason. Both are mistaken; the sales tax is an income tax, though of a more haphazard and uncertain incidence. The major effect of the general sales tax will be that of the income tax—to reduce the consumption and the saving-investment of the taxpayers.47 In fact, since, as we have seen, the income tax by its nature falls more heavily on savings-investment than on consumption, we reach the paradoxical and important conclusion that a tax on consumption will fall more heavily on savings-investment than on consumption in its ultimate incidence.

• 44It might be objected that the firms can pass along the sales tax because it is a general increase for all firms. Aside from the fact that no relevant general factor (supply, demand for money) has increased, the individual firm is still concerned only with its individual demand curve, and these curves have not shifted. A tax increase has done nothing to make a higher price more profitable than it was before.
• 45Resources can now shift only from work into idleness (or into barter). This, of course, may and probably will happen; since, as we shall see further, a sales tax is a tax on incomes, the rise in opportunity cost of leisure may push some workers into idleness and thereby lower the quantity of goods produced. To this extent, prices will eventually rise, although hardly in the smooth, immediate, proportionate way of “shifting.” See the pioneering article by Harry Gunnison Brown, “The Incidence of a General Output or a General Sales Tax,” reprinted in R.A. Musgrave and C.S. Shoup, eds., Readings in the Economics of Taxation (Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin, 1959), pp. 330–39. While this was the first modern attack on the fallacy that sales taxes are shifted forward, Brown unfortunately weakened the implications of this thesis toward the end of his article.
• 46Of course, if the money supply is increased after a wage rise, and credit expanded, prices can be raised so that money wages are again not above their discounted marginal value products.
• 47Mr. Frank Chodorov, in his The Income Tax—Root of All Evil (New York: Devin-Adair, 1954), fails to indicate what other type of tax would be “better” from a free-market point of view, than the income tax. It is clear from our discussion that there are few taxes indeed that will not be as bad as the income tax from the viewpoint of the free market. Certainly sales or excise taxation will not fill the bill.
       Mr. Chodorov, furthermore, is surely wrong when he terms income and inheritance taxes unique denials of the right of individual property. Any tax whatever infringes on property right, and there is nothing in an “indirect tax” which makes the infringement any less clear. It is true that an income tax forces the subject to keep records and disclose his personal dealings, thus imposing a further loss in his utility. The sales tax, however, also forces record-keeping; the difference again is one of degree rather than of kind, since here the directness covers only retail storekeepers instead of the bulk of the population.

Wherever taxes fall, they blight, hamper, and distort the productive activity of the market. Clearly, a tax on wages will distort the allocation of labor effort, a tax on profits will cripple the profit-and-loss motor of the economy, a tax on interest will tend to consume capital, etc. One commonly conceded exception to this rule is the doctrine of Henry George that ground-landowners perform no productive function and that therefore the government may safely tax site value without reducing the supply of productive services on the market. This is the economic, as distinguished from the moral, rationale for the famous “single tax.” Unhappily, very few economists have challenged this basic assumption, the single-tax proposal being generally rejected on grounds purely pragmatic (“there is no way in practice of distinguishing site from improvement value of land”) or conservative (“too much has been invested in land to expropriate the landowners now”).48

Yet this central Georgist contention is completely fallacious. The owner of ground land performs a very important productive service. He finds, brings into use, and then allocates, land sites to the most value-productive bidders. We must not be misled by the fact that the physical stock of land is fixed at any given time. In the case of land, as of other material goods, it is not just the physical good that is being sold, but a whole bundle of services along with it—among which is the service of transferring ownership from seller to buyer, and doing so efficiently. Ground land does not simply exist; it must be served to the user by the owner (one man, of course, can perform both functions when the land is “vertically integrated”).49 The landowner earns the highest ground rents by allocating land sites to their most value-productive uses, i.e., to those uses most desired by consumers. In particular, we must not overlook the importance of location and the productive service of the site-owner in assuring the most productive locations for each particular use.

The view that bringing sites into use and deciding upon their location is not really “productive” is a vestige from the old classical view that a service which does not tangibly “create” something physical is not “really” productive.50 Actually, this function is just as productive as any other, and a particularly vital function it is. To hamper and destroy this function would wreck the market economy.51

• 48Thus, even so eminent an economist as F.A. Hayek has recently written:
  This scheme [the single tax] for the socialization of land is, in its logic, probably the most seductive and plausible of all socialist schemes. If the factual assumptions on which it is based were correct, i.e., if it were possible to distinguish clearly between the value of the “permanent and indestructible powers” of the soil ... and ... the value due to ... improvement ... the argument for its adoption would be very strong. (F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty , pp. 352–53) Also see a somewhat similar concession by the Austrian economist von Wieser. Friedrich Freiherr von Wieser, “The Theory of Urban Ground Rent” in Louise Sommer, ed., Essays in European Economic Thought (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1960), pp. 78 ff.
• 49I do not know anyone who has brought out the productivity of landowners as clearly as Mr. Spencer Heath, an ex-Georgist. See Spencer Heath, How Come That We Finance World Communism? (mimeographed MS., New York: Science of Society Foundation, 1953); idem, Rejoinder to ‘Vituperation Well Answered’ by Mr. Mason Gaffney (New York: Science of Society Foundation, 1953); idem, Progress and Poverty Reviewed (New York: The Freeman, 1952).
• 50Spencer Heath comments on Henry George as follows:
  Wherever the services of land owners are concerned he is firm in his dictum that all values are physical. ... In the exchange services performed by [landowners], their social distribution of sites and resources, no physical production is involved; hence he is unable to see that they are entitled to any share in the distribution of physical things and that the rent they receive ... is but recompense for their non-coercive distributive or exchange services. ... He rules out all creation of values by the services performed in [land] distribution by free contract and exchange, which is the sole alternative to either a violent and disorderly or an arbitrary and tyrannical distribution of land. (Heath, Progress and Poverty Reviewed, pp. 9–10)
• 51For the effects of the “single tax” and for other criticisms, see Murray N. Rothbard, The Single Tax: Economic and Moral Implications (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1957); Rothbard, “A Reply to Georgist Criticisms” (mimeographed MS., Foundation for Economic Education, 1957); and Frank H. Knight, “The Fallacies in the ‘Single Tax,’” The Freeman, August 10, 1953, pp. 810–11. One of the more amusing objections is that of the dean of Georgist economists, Dr. Harry Gunnison Brown. Although the Georgists base much of their economic case on a sharp distinction between ownership of land and ownership of improvements on that land, Brown tries to refute the disruptive economic effects of the single tax by implicitly assuming that land and improvements are owned by the same people anyway! Actually, of course, the disruptive effects remain; vertical integration by individuals or firms does not remove the economic principle from either of the integrated stages of production. See Harry Gunnison Brown, “Foundations, Professors and ‘Economic Education,’” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, January, 1958, pp. 150–52.

In this necessarily hasty overview of the high spots of taxation theory, we have space for only one more comment: a criticism of the very common view that, in a business boom, the government should increase taxation “in order to sop up excess purchasing power,” and thereby halt the inflation and stabilize the economy. We shall discuss the problems of inflation, stabilization, and the business cycle below; here, let us note the oddity of assuming that a tax is somehow less of a social cost, less of a burden, than a price. Thus, suppose, in a boom, that Messrs. A, B, and C, with the money they have on hand, would spend a certain amount on some commodity—say pipes—at a certain market price, e.g., $10 per pipe. The government decides that this is a most unfortunate situation, that the market price is—by some arbitrary, undivulged standard—”too high,” and that therefore it must help its subjects by taxing their money away from them, and thus lowering prices. Suppose, indeed, that A, B, and C are taxed sufficiently to lower the pipe price to, say, $8. By what reasoning are they better off, now that taxes have been increased by precisely the amount that their monetary funds have dwindled? In short, the “tax price” has gone up in order that the prices of other goods may decline. Why is a voluntary price, paid willingly by buyers and accepted by sellers, somehow “bad” or burdensome for the buyers, while at the same time a “price” levied compulsorily on the same buyers for dubious governmental services for which they have not demonstrated a need is somehow “good”? Why are high prices burdensome and high taxes not?

Government expenditures52 are a coerced transfer of resources from private producers to the uses preferred by government officials. It is customary to classify government spending into two categories: resource-using, and transfer. Resource-using expenditures frankly shift resources from private persons in society to the use of government: this may take the form of hiring bureaucrats to work for government—which shifts labor resources directly—or of buying products from business firms. Transfer payments are pure subsidy spending—when the government takes from Peter to pay Paul. It is true that, in the latter case, the government gives “Paul” money to decide the allocation as he wishes, and in a sense we may analyze the two types of spending separately. But the similarities here are greater than the differences. For, in both cases, resources are seized from private producers and shifted to the uses which government officials think best. After all, when a bureaucrat receives his government salary, this payment is in the same sense a “transfer payment” from the taxpayers, and the bureaucrat is also free to decide how further to allocate the income at his command. In both cases, money and resources are shifted from producers to nonproducers, who consume or otherwise use them.53

This type of analysis of government has been neglected because economists and statisticians tend to assume, rather blithely, that government expenditures are a measure of its productive contribution to society. In the “private sector” of the economy, the value of productive output is sensibly gauged by the amount of money that consumers spend voluntarily on that output. Curiously, on the other hand, the government’s “productive output” is gauged, not by what is spent on government, but by what government itself spends! No wonder that grandiose claims are often made for the unique productive power of government spending, when a mere increase in that spending serves to raise the government’s “productive contribution” to the economy.54

What, then, is the productive contribution of government? Since the value of government is not gauged on the market, and the payments to the government are not voluntary, it is impossible to estimate. It is impossible to know how much would be paid in to the government were it purely voluntary, or indeed, whether one central government in each geographical area would exist at all. Since, then, the only thing we do know is that the tax-and-spend process diverts income and resources from what they would have been doing in the “private sector,” we must conclude that the government’s productive contribution to the economy is precisely zero. Furthermore, even if it be objected that governmental services are worth something, it would have to be noted that we are again suffering from the error pointed out by Bastiat: a sole emphasis on what is seen, to the neglect of what is not seen. We may see the government’s hydroelectric dam in operation; we do not see the things that private individuals would have done with the money—whether buying consumers’ goods or investing in producers’ goods—but which they were compelled to forgo. In fact, since private consumers would have done something else, something more desired, and therefore from their point of view more productive, with the money, we can be sure that the loss in productivity incurred by the government’s tax and spending is greater than whatever productivity it has contributed. In short, strictly, the government’s productivity is not simply zero, but negative, for it has imposed a loss in productivity upon society.55

Government expenditure is often referred to as “investment” resulting in “capital.” And we have heard much in recent years about Soviet and other multi-Year Plans busily engaged in building up “capital” by government action. Yet it is illegitimate to use the term “capital” for government expenditures. Capital is the status of productive goods along the path to eventual consumption. In any sort of division-of-labor economy, capital goods are built, not for their own sake by the investor, but in order to use them to produce lower-order and eventually consumers’ goods. In short, a characteristic of an investment expenditure is that the good in question is not being used to fulfill the needs of the investor, but of someone else—the consumer. Yet, when government confiscates resources from the private market economy, it is precisely defying the wishes of the consumers; when government invests in any good, it does so to serve the whims of government officials, not the desires of consumers. Therefore, no government expenditures can be considered genuine “investment,” and no government-owned assets can be considered capital. Government expenditures are divisible into two parts: consumption expenditures by government officials, beneficiaries of government subsidies, and other nonproductive recipients; and waste expenditures, where government officials really believe that they are “investing” in “capital.” These waste expenditures result in waste assets.56 The consumption of the governmentally privileged is, of course, in a different category from private consumption, since it is necessarily at the expense of the private consumption of producers. We may therefore call the former “antiproductive consumption.”57

• 52Government expenditures are made from government revenue. In the preceding section we have dealt with the major source of governmental revenue, taxation. Below we shall deal with inflation, or money creation, and in the present section a discussion of government “enterprise” is included. For a brief treatment of the final major source of government revenue—borrowing from the public—see Appendix A below.
• 53It may be objected that while bureaucrats may not be producers, other “Pauls” who receive subsidies on occasion are basically producers on the market. To the extent that they receive subsidies from the government, however, they are being nonproductive and living off the producers by compulsion. What is relevant, in short, is the extent to which they are in a relation of State to their fellow men. We might add that, in this work, the term “State” is never meant in an anthropomorphic manner. “State” really means people acting toward one another in a systematically “stateish” relationship.
       I am indebted to Mr. Ralph Raico, of the University of Chicago, for the “relation of State” concept.
• 54Originally, Professor Simon Kuznets contended that only taxes should gauge the government’s productive output, thus measuring product by revenue as in the case of private firms. But taxes, being compulsory, cannot be used as a productive gauge. In contrast to the present method of national income accounting, Kuznets would have eliminated all government deficits from its “productive contribution.”
• 55Even for those who do not accept this analysis, any who believe, empirically, that waste in government exceeds 50 percent of its expenditures would have to agree that our assumption is more accurate than the current estimate of 100 percent productivity by the government.
• 56If a waste asset owned by the government is sold to private enterprise, then all or part of it might become a capital good. But this potential does not make the good capital while used by the government. It might be objected that government purchases are genuine investments when used by a government “enterprise” that charges prices on the market. We shall see, however, that this is not really enterprise but playing at enterprise.
       See below for a more detailed discussion of the waste involved in waste assets.
• 57This is to be distinguished from the classical concept of “nonproductive consumption” as all consumption above that needed to maintain the productive capacity of the laborer.

Let us delve a little further into the typology of government spending. Transfer spending or subsidies distort the market by coercively penalizing the efficient for the benefit of the inefficient. (And it does so even if the firm or individual is efficient without a subsidy, for its activities are then being encouraged beyond their most economic point.) Subsidies prolong the life of inefficient firms and prevent the flexibility of the market from fully satisfying consumer wants. The greater the extent of government subsidy, the more the market is prevented from working, the more resources are frozen in inefficient ways, and the lower will be the standard of living of everyone. Furthermore, the more government intervenes and subsidizes, the more caste conflict will be created in society, for individuals and groups will benefit only at one another’s expense. The more widespread the tax-and-subsidy process, the more people will be induced to abandon production and join the army of those who live coercively off production. Production and living standards will be progressively lowered as energy is diverted from production to politics and as government saddles a dwindling base of production with a growing and more top-heavy burden of the State-privileged. This process will be all the more accelerated because those who succeed in any activity will invariably tend to be those who are best at performing it. Those who particularly flourish on the free market, therefore, will be those most adept at production and at serving their fellow men; those who succeed in the political struggle for subsidies, on the other hand, will be those most adept at wielding coercion or at winning favors from wielders of coercion. Generally, different people will be in the different categories of the successful, in accordance with the universal specialization of skills. Furthermore, for those who are skillful at both, the tax-and-subsidy system will encourage and promote their predatory skills and penalize their productive ones.

A common example of direct transfer subsidy is governmental poor relief. State poor relief is clearly a subsidization of poverty, for men are now automatically entitled to money from the State because of their poverty. Hence, the marginal disutility of income forgone from leisure diminishes, and idleness and poverty tend to increase further, which in turn increases the amount of subsidy that must be extracted from the taxpayers. Thus, a system of legally subsidized poverty tends to call forth more of the very poverty that is supposedly being alleviated. When, as is generally the case, the amount of subsidy depends directly on the number of children possessed by the pauper, there is a further incentive for the pauper to breed more children than otherwise and thereby multiply the number of paupers—and even more dependent paupers—still further.58 The sincerity of the State’s desire to promote charity towards the poor may be gauged by two perennial drives of government: to suppress “charity rackets” and to drive individual beggars off the streets because the “government makes plenty of provision for them.”59 The effect of both measures is to cripple voluntary individual gifts of charity and to force the public to route its giving into the channels approved by, and tied in with, government officialdom.

Similarly, governmental unemployment relief, often supposed to help in curing unemployment, has the precisely reverse effect: it subsidizes and intensifies unemployment. We have seen that unemployment arises when laborers or unions set a minimum wage above what they could obtain on the unhampered market. Tax aid helps them to keep this unrealistic minimum and hence prolongs the period of unemployment and aggravates the problem.

• 58As Thomas Mackay aptly stated: “We can have exactly as many paupers as the country chooses to pay for.” Thomas Mackay, Methods of Social Reform (London: John Murray, 1896), p. 210. Private charity to the poor, on the other hand, would not have the same vicious-circle effect, since the poor would not have a continuing compulsory claim on the rich. This is particularly true where private charity is given only to the “deserving” poor. On the nineteenth-century concept of the “deserving poor,” cf. Barbara Wootton, Social Science and Social Pathology (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959), pp. 51, 55, and 268 ff.
• 59The reader may gauge from the following anecdote by an admirer of such a drive just who was the true friend of the poor organ-grinder—his customer or the government:
  During a similar campaign to clean up the streets of organ-grinders (most of whom were simply licensed beggars) a woman came up to LaGuardia at a social function and begged him not to deprive her of her favorite organ-grinder.
  “Where do you live?” he asked her.
  “On Park Avenue!”
  LaGuardia successfully pushed through his plan to eliminate the organ-grinders and the peddlers, despite the pleas of the penthouse slummers. (Newbold Morris and Dana Lee Thomas, Let the Chips Fall [New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955], pp. 119–20)

Let us now return to the resource-using activities of government, where the State professes to be providing a service of some sort to the public. Government “service” may be either furnished free or sold at a price to users. “Free” services are particularly characteristic of government. Police and military protection, firefighting, education, parks, some water supply come to mind as examples. The first point to note, of course, is that these services are not and cannot be truly free. A free good, as we saw early in this book, would not be a good and hence not an object of human action; it would simply exist in superabundance for all. If a good does not exist aplenty for all, then the resource is scarce, and supplying it costs society other goods forgone. Hence it cannot be free. The resources needed to supply the free governmental service are extracted from the rest of production. Payment is made, however, not by users on the basis of their voluntary purchases, but by a coerced levy on the taxpayers. A basic split is thus effected between payment and receipt of service. This split is inherent in all government operations.

Many grave consequences follow from the split and from the “free” service as well. As in all cases where price is below the free-market price, an enormous and excessive demand is stimulated for the good, far beyond the supply of service available. Consequently, there will always be “shortages” of the free good, constant complaints of insufficiency, overcrowding, etc. An illustration is the perpetual complaints about police insufficiency, particularly in crime-ridden districts, about teacher and school shortages in the public school system, about traffic jams on government-owned streets and highways, etc. In no area of the free market are there such chronic complaints about shortages, insufficiencies, and low quality service. In all areas of private enterprise, firms try to coax and persuade consumers to buy more of their product. Where government owns and operates, on the other hand, there are invariably calls on consumers for patience and sacrifice, and problems of shortages and deficiencies continually abound. It is doubtful if any private enterprise would ever do what the New York City and other governments have done: exhort consumers to use less water. It is also characteristic of government operation that when a water shortage develops, it is the consumers and not the government “enterprisers” who are blamed for the shortage. The pressure is on consumers to sacrifice, and to use less, while in private industry the (welcome) pressure is on entrepreneurs to supply more.60

The well-known inefficiencies of government operation are not empirical accidents, resulting perhaps from the lack of a civil service tradition. They are inherent in all government enterprise, and the excessive demand fomented by free and other underpriced services is just one of the many reasons for this condition.

Free supply not only subsidizes the users at the expense of nonusing taxpayers; it also misallocates resources by failing to supply the service where it is most needed. The same is true, to a lesser extent, wherever the price is under the free-market price. On the free market, consumers can dictate the pricing and thereby assure the best allocation of productive resources to supply their wants. In a government enterprise, this cannot be done. Let us take again the case of the free service. Since there is no pricing, and therefore no exclusion of submarginal uses, there is no way that the government, even if it wanted to, could allocate its services to their most important uses and to the most eager buyers. All buyers, all uses, are artificially kept on the same plane. As a result, the most important uses will be slighted. The government is faced with insuperable allocation problems, which it cannot solve even to its own satisfaction. Thus, the government will be confronted with the problem: Should we build a road in place A or place B? There is no rational way whatever by which it can make this decision. It cannot aid the private consumers of the road in the best way. It can decide only according to the whim of the ruling government official, i.e., only if the government officials do the “consuming,” and not the public.61 If the government wishes to do what is best for the public, it is faced with an impossible task.

• 60See Murray N. Rothbard, “Government in Business” in Essays on Liberty (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1958), I V, 186 ff. It is therefore characteristic of government ownership and “enterprise” that the consumer becomes, not a “king” to be courted, but a troublesome fellow bent on using up the “social” product.
• 61Thus, the government official may select a road that will yield him or his allies more votes.

Government may either subsidize deliberately by giving a service away free, or it may genuinely try to find the true market price, i.e., to “operate on a business basis.” The latter is often the cry raised by conservatives—that government enterprise be placed on a business footing, that deficits be ended, etc. Almost always this means raising the price. Is this a rational solution, however? It is often stated that a single government enterprise, operating within the sphere of a private market and buying resources from it, can price its services and allocate its resources efficiently. This, however, is incorrect. There is a fatal flaw that permeates every conceivable scheme of government enterprise and ineluctably prevents it from rational pricing and efficient allocation of resources. Because of this flaw, government enterprise can never be operated on a “business” basis, no matter how ardent a government’s intentions.

What is this fatal flaw? It is the fact that government can obtain virtually unlimited resources by means of the coercive tax power (i.e., limited only by the total resources of society). Private businesses must obtain their funds from private investors. This allocation of funds by investors, based on time preference and foresight, “rations” funds and resources to the most profitable and therefore the most serviceable uses. Private firms can get funds only from consumers and investors; they can get funds, in other words, only from people who value and buy their services and from savers who are willing to risk investment of their saved funds in anticipation of profit. In short, payment and service are, we repeat, indissolubly linked on the market. But government, on the other hand, can get as much money as it likes. The free market therefore provides a “mechanism,” which we have analyzed in detail, for allocating funds for future and present consumption, for directing resources to their most value-productive uses for all the people. It thereby provides a means for businessmen to allocate resources and to price services to insure optimum use. Government, however, has no checkrein on itself, i.e., no requirement of meeting a test of profit-and-loss or valued service to consumers, to permit it to obtain funds. Private enterprise can get funds only from satisfied, valuing customers and from investors guided by present and expected future profits and losses. Government gets more funds at its own whim.

With the checkrein gone, gone also is any opportunity for government to allocate resources rationally. How can it know whether to build road A or road B, whether to “invest” in a road or a school—in fact, how much to spend for all of its activities? There is no rational way that it can allocate funds or even decide how much to have. When there is a shortage of teachers or schoolrooms or police or streets, the government and its supporters have only one answer: more money. The people must relinquish more of their money to the government. Why is this type of answer never offered on the free market? The reason is that money must always be withdrawn from some other use in consumption or investment—and this withdrawal must be justified. On the market, justification is provided by the test of profit and loss—the indication that the most urgent wants of the consumers are being satisfied. If an enterprise or product is earning high profits for its owners, and these profits are expected to continue, more money will be forthcoming; if not, and losses are being incurred, money will flow out of the industry. The profit-and-loss test serves as the critical guide for directing the flow of productive resources. No such guide exists for government, which therefore has no rational way to decide how much money to spend in total or in each specific line. The more money it spends, the more service, of course, it can supply—but where to stop?62

Proponents of government enterprise may retort that the government should simply tell its bureau to act as if it were a profit-making enterprise and to establish itself in the same way as a private business. There are two basic flaws in this theory: (1) It is impossible to play enterprise. Enterprise means risking one’s own money in investment. Bureaucratic managers and politicians have no real incentive to develop entrepreneurial skills, to really adjust to consumer demands. They do not risk loss of their money in the enterprise. (2) Aside from the question of incentives, even the most eager managers could not function as a business. For, regardless of the treatment accorded the operation after it is established, the initial launching of the firm is made with government money, and therefore by coercive levy. A fatally arbitrary element has been “built into” the very vitals of the enterprise. Furthermore, future decisions on expenditures will be made out of tax funds and will therefore be subject to the same flaw. The ease of obtaining money will inherently distort the operations of government enterprise. Moreover, suppose that the government “invests” in an enterprise E. Either the free market, left alone, would also have invested in this selfsame enterprise, or it would not. If it would have, then the economy suffers, at the very least, from the “take” going to the intermediary bureaucracy. If not, and this is almost certain, then it follows immediately that the expenditure on E is a distortion of private utility on the market—that some other expenditure would have brought greater monetary returns. It follows once again that a government enterprise cannot duplicate the conditions of private business.

In addition, the establishment of government enterprise creates an “unfair” competitive advantage over private firms, for at least part of its capital was gained by coercion rather than service. It is clear that government, with its subsidization, can drive a private business out of the field. Private investment in the same industry will be greatly restricted, since future investors will anticipate losses at the hands of privileged governmental competitors. Moreover, since all services compete for the consumer’s dollar, all private firms and all private investment will to some degree be affected and hampered. And when a new government enterprise begins, it generates fears in other industries that they will be next, that they will either be confiscated or forced to compete with government-subsidized enterprises. This fear tends to repress productive investment further and thus lower the general standard of living still more.

Another argument, used quite correctly by “leftist” proponents of government ownership, is this: If business operation is so desirable, why take such a tortuous route? Why not scrap government ownership and turn the whole operation over to private business enterprise? Why go to such elaborate lengths to try to imitate the apparent ideal (private ownership) when the ideal may be pursued directly? The call for business principles in government, therefore, makes little sense, even if that call could be successful.

Many “criteria” have been offered by writers as guides for the pricing of government services. One criterion supports pricing according to “marginal cost.” As we have indicated above, however, this is hardly a criterion at all and rests on classical fallacies of price determination by costs. “Marginal” varies according to the period of time surveyed. And costs are not in fact static but flexible; they change according to prices and hence cannot be used as a guide to the setting of prices. Moreover, prices equal average costs only in final equilibrium, and equilibrium cannot be regarded as an ideal for the real world. The market only tends toward this goal. Finally, costs of government operation will be higher than for similar operations on the free market.63

Government enterprise will not only hamper and repress private investment and entrepreneurship in the same industry and in industries throughout the economy; it will also disrupt the entire labor market. For the government (a) will decrease production and living standards in the society by siphoning off potentially productive labor to the bureaucracy; (b) using confiscated funds, it will be able to pay more than the market rate for labor and hence set up a clamor by government job-seekers for an expansion of the unproductive bureaucratic machine; and (c) the government’s high tax-supported wages may well mislead workers into believing that this reflects the market wage in private industry, thus causing unwanted unemployment.

The inefficiencies of government operation are compounded by several other factors. As we have seen, a government enterprise competing in an industry can usually drive out private owners, since the government can subsidize itself in many ways and supply itself with unlimited funds when desired. In cases where it cannot compete even under these conditions, it can arrogate to itself a compulsory monopoly, driving out competitors by force. This was done in the United States in the case of the post office.64 When the government thus grants itself a monopoly, it may go to the other extreme from free service; it may charge a monopoly price. Charging a monopoly price—now identifiably different from a free-market price—distorts resources again and creates an artificial scarcity of the particular good. It also permits an enormously lowered quality of service. A governmental monopoly need not worry that customers may go elsewhere or that inefficiency may mean its demise.65 It is particularly absurd to call for “business principles” where a government enterprise functions as a monopoly. Periodically, for example, there are demands that the post office be put on a “business basis” and end its deficit, which must be paid by the taxpayers. But ending the deficit of an inherently and necessarily inefficient government operation does not mean going on a business basis. To cover costs, the price must be raised high enough to achieve a monopoly price and so camouflage and compensate for the government’s inefficiencies. A monopoly price will levy an excessive burden on the users of the postal service, especially since the monopoly is compulsory. On the other hand, we have seen that even monopolists must abide by the consumers’ demand schedule. If this demand schedule is elastic enough, it may well happen that a monopoly price will reduce revenue so much or cut down so much on its increase that a higher price will increase deficits rather than reduce them. An outstanding example has been the New York City subway system in recent years.66

• 62Cf. Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), pp. 50, 53.
• 63arious fallacious criteria have been advanced for deciding between private and state action. One common rule is to weigh “marginal social costs” and benefits against “marginal private costs” and benefits. Apart from other flaws, there is no such entity as “society” separate from constituent individuals, so that this preferred criterion is simply meaningless.
• 64See the interesting pamphlet by Frank Chodorov, The Myth of the Post Office (Hinsdale, Ill.: Henry Regnery Co., 1948). On a similar situation in England, see Frederick Millar, “The Evils of State Trading as Illustrated by the Post Office” in Thomas Mackay, ed., A Plea for Liberty (New York: D. Appleton Co., 1891), pp. 305–25. For a portrayal of the political factors that have systematically distorted economic considerations in setting postal rates in the United States, see Jane Kennedy, “Development of Postal Rates: 1845–1955,” Land Economics, May, 1957, pp. 93–112; and Kennedy, “Structure and Policy in Postal Rates,” Journal of Political Economy, June, 1957, pp. 185–208.
• 65Only governments can make self-satisfied announcements of cuts in service in order to effect economies. In private business, economies must be made as corollaries to improvements in service. A recent example of a cut in government service—in the midst of improving private services in most other fields—was the decline in American postal deliveries from two to one a day, coupled, of course, with perennial requests for higher rates.
       When France nationalized the important Western Railway system in 1908, freight was increasingly damaged, trains slowed down, and accidents grew at such a pace that an economist caustically observed that the French government had added railway accidents to its growing list of monopolies. See Murray N. Rothbard, “The Railroads of France,” Ideas on Liberty, September, 1955, p. 42.
• 66Ironically enough, the higher fares have driven many customers to buying and driving their own cars, thus aggravating the perennial traffic problem (shortage of government street space) even further. Another example of government intervention creating and multiplying its own difficulties! On the subways, see Ludwig von Mises, “The Agony of the Welfare State,” The Freeman, May 4, 1953, pp. 556–57.

We have seen in chapter 10 above that one cartel or one firm could not own all the means of production in the economy, because it could not calculate prices and allocate factors in a rational manner. And we have seen that this is the reason why State socialism could also not plan or allocate rationally. We further noted that two or more stages could not be totally integrated vertically on the market—for total integration would eliminate a whole segment of the market and establish an island of calculational and allocational chaos, an island that would preclude optimal planning for profits and maximum satisfaction for the consumers.

In the case of simple government ownership, still another extension of this thesis becomes evident. For each governmental firm introduces its own island of chaos into the economy; there is no need to wait for full socialism for chaos to begin its work. No government enterprise can ever determine prices or costs or allocate factors or funds in a rational, welfare-maximizing manner. No government enterprise could be established on a “business basis” even if the desire were present. Thus, any governmental operation injects a point of chaos into the economy; and since all markets are interconnected in the economy, every governmental activity disrupts and distorts pricing, the allocation of factors, consumption/investment ratios, etc. Every government enterprise not only lowers the social utilities of the consumers by forcing the allocation of funds to other ends than those desired by the public; it lowers the utility of everyone (including the utilities of some government officials) by distorting the market and spreading calculational chaos. The greater the extent of government ownership, of course, the more powerful will this impact become.

Aside from its purely economic consequences, government ownership has another kind of impact on society; it necessarily substitutes conflict for the harmony of the free market. Since government service means service by one set of decision-makers, it comes to mean uniform service. The desires of all those forced, directly or indirectly, to pay for the government service cannot be satisfied. Only some forms of the service can or will be produced by the government agency. As a result, government enterprise creates enormous caste conflicts among the citizens, each of whom has different ideas on the best form of service. In the final result, government enterprise can hardly fail to substitute its own values, or the values of one set of customers, for the values of all others. Artificially standardized services of poorer quality—fit to governmental taste or convenience—will hold sway, in contrast to the diversified services of higher quality which the free market supplies to fit the tastes of a multitude of individuals.

In recent years government schools in America have furnished a striking example of such problems and conflicts. Some parents prefer racially segregated schools; others prefer integrated education. Some parents want their children taught socialism; others want antisocialist teaching in the schools. There is no way that the government can resolve these conflicts. It can only impose the will of one group by coercion and leave the others dissatisfied and unhappy. Whichever type of school is chosen, some groups of parents will suffer. On the other hand, there is no such conflict on the free market, which provides any type of service demanded. On the market, those who want segregated or integrated, prosocialist or individualist, schools can have their wants satisfied. It is obvious, therefore, that governmental, as opposed to private, provision of services, lowers the standard of living of much of the population.

The degrees of government ownership in the economy vary from one country to another, but in all countries the State has made sure that it owns and monopolizes the vital nerve centers, the command posts of the society. It has acquired compulsory monopoly ownership over these command posts, and it has always asserted, without proof, that private ownership and enterprise in these fields is simply and a priori impossible.

Such vital command posts are defense, money (the mint and, nowadays, note issue), rivers and coastal seas, streets and highways, land generally (the “public domain” and the power of “eminent domain”), and the post office. The defense function is particularly vital to the State’s existence, for on its virtual monopoly of force depends its ability to extract taxes from its citizens. Another critical command post held, though not always monopolized by, the State is education. For government schooling permits the influencing of the youthful mind to accept the virtues of the government under which it lives and of the principle of government intervention. Conservatives who often attack “socialistic” teaching in government schools are particularly wide of the mark, for the very fact that a government school exists and is therefore presumed to be good teaches its little charges the virtues of government ownership by example. And if government ownership is good and even preferable in schooling, why not for other educational media, e.g., newspapers—or for other important social services?

Even where the government does not have a compulsory monopoly of schooling, it approaches this ideal by compelling attendance of all children at either a government school or a private school approved by the government. Compulsory attendance brings into the schools those who do not desire or cannot benefit from schooling and forces them out of such competing fields as leisure and business employment.

Finally, government ownership is often referred to as “public” ownership (the “public domain,” “public schools,” the “public sector”). The implication is that when government owns anything, every member of the public owns equal shares of that property. But we have seen that the important feature of ownership is not legal formality but actual rule, and under government ownership it is the government officialdom that controls and directs, and therefore “owns,” the property. Any member of the “public” who thinks he owns the property may test this theory by trying to appropriate for his own individual use his aliquot part of government property.67 ,68

While rulers of government own “public” property, their ownership is not secure in the long run, since they may always be defeated in an election or deposed. Hence government officials will tend to regard themselves as only transitory owners of “public” resources. While a private owner, secure in his property and its capital value, may plan the use of his resource over a long period of time in the future, the government official must exploit “his” property as quickly as he can, since he has no security of tenure. And even the most securely entrenched civil servant must concentrate on present use, because government officials cannot usually sell the capitalized value of their property, as private owners can. In short, except in the case of the “private property” of a hereditary monarch, government officials own the current use of resources, but not their capital value. But if a resource itself cannot be owned, but only its current use, there will rapidly ensue an uneconomic exhaustion of the resource, since it will be to no one’s benefit to conserve it over a period of time, and yet to each owner’s advantage to use it up quickly. It is particularly curious, then, that almost all writers parrot the notion that private owners, possessing time preference, must take the “short view” in using their resources, while only government officials are properly equipped to exercise the “long view.” The truth is precisely the reverse. The private individual, secure in his capital ownership, can afford to take the long view because of his interest in maintaining the capital value of his resource. It is the government official who must take and run, who must exploit the property quickly while he is still in command.69

• 67It might be objected that individual stockholders of corporations cannot do this either, e.g., a General Motors stockholder is not allowed to seize a car in lieu of cash dividends or in exchange for his stock. Yet stockholders do own their company, and this example precisely proves our point. For the individual stockholder can contract out of his company; he can sell his aliquot shares of General Motors stock to someone else. The subject of government cannot contract out of that government; he cannot sell his “shares” in the post office, for example, because he has no such shares. As F.A. Harper has succintly stated: “The corollary of the right of ownership is the right of disownership. So if I cannot sell a thing, it is evident that I do not really own it.” Harper, Liberty: A Path to Its Recovery, pp. 106, 32. Also see Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (New York: Putnam’s, 1943), pp. 179 ff., and T. Robert Ingram, Schools: Government or Public? (Houston: St. Thomas Press, n.d.).
• 68It might be noted that even if all the fallacious planks of the Henry George structure were conceded, the Single Tax program would still not follow from the premises. As Benjamin Tucker brilliantly demonstrated years ago, the most that could possibly be established would be each man’s “right” to his tiny aliquot part of the site value of every plot of land—not the State’s right to the whole value. Tucker, Individual Liberty, pp. 241–43.
• 69Those who object that private individuals are mortal, while “governments are immortal,” indulge in the fallacy of conceptual realism at its starkest. “Government” is not a real acting entity, but rather a type of interpersonal action adopted by actual individuals.

Before ending our discussion of specific governmental activities, we may note in passing a curiously popular form of government expenditure: “social security.” Social security confiscates the income of wage earners, and then, most people presume, it invests the money more wisely than they could themselves, later paying out the money to the former wage earners in their old age. Considered as “social insurance,” this is a typical example of government enterprise: there is no relation between premiums and benefits, the latter changing yearly under the impact of political pressures. On the free market, anyone who wishes may invest in an insurance annuity or in stocks or real estate. Compelling everyone to transfer his funds to the government forces him to lose utility. Thus, even on its face, it is difficult to understand the great popularity of the social security program. But the true nature of the program differs greatly from the popular image. For the government does not invest the funds it takes in taxes; it simply spends them, giving itself its own bonds which must later be cashed when the benefits fall due. The cash, of course, can be obtained only by further taxation. Thus the public must pay twice for one payment of social security. The program is essentially one of making more palatable a general taxation of lower-income, wage-earning groups.

When government ownership or control extends to the entire productive system, then the economic system is called socialism. Socialism, in short, is the violent abolition of the market, the compulsory monopolization of the entire productive sphere by the State. There are two and only two ways that any economy can be organized. One is by freedom and voluntary choice—the way of the market. The other is by force and dictation—the way of the State. To those ignorant of economics, it may seem that the way of the market is only anarchic confusion and chaos, while the way of the State constitutes genuine organization and “central planning.” On the contrary, we have seen in this book what an amazing and flexible mechanism the market is for satisfying the wants of all individuals. State operation or intervention is, on the other hand, far less efficient and creates many disruptive and cumulative problems of its own. Moreover, a socialist State, deprived of the real market and its determination of prices for producers’ goods, cannot calculate and can therefore run a productive system only in chaotic fashion. The economics of socialism—a whole branch of economics of its own—can only be touched upon here; suffice it to say that Mises’ demonstration of the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism has never been successfully refuted.70

Here we might mention just a few points on the economics of socialism. One, since ownership is, de facto, the control of a resource, a Nazi, Fascist, or other “centrally planned” system is as much “socialism” as a Communist regime that officially nationalizes property.71 Secondly, the extent of socialism in the present-day world is at the same time underestimated in countries such as the United States and overestimated in Soviet Russia. It is underestimated because the expansion of government lending to private enterprise in the United States has been generally neglected, and we have seen that the lender, regardless of his legal status, is also an entrepreneur and part owner. The extent of socialism is overestimated because most writers ignore the fact that Russia, socialist as she is, cannot have full socialism as long as she can still refer to the relatively free markets existing in other parts of the world. In short, a single socialist country or bloc of countries, while inevitably experiencing enormous difficulties and wastes in planning, can still buy and sell and refer to the world market and can therefore at least vaguely approximate some sort of rational pricing of producers’ goods by extrapolating from that market.72 The well-known wastes and errors of this partial socialist planning are negligible compared to what would be experienced under the total calculational chaos of a world socialist state.

Another neglected factor diminishing the extent of planning in socialist countries is “black market” activities, particularly in commodities (candy, cigarettes, drugs, stockings, etc.) that are easy to conceal. Even in bulkier commodities, falsification of records and extensive graft may bring some sort of limited market—a market violating all the socialist plans—into existence.73

Moreover, it should be noted that a centrally “planned” economy is a centrally prohibited economy. The concept of “social engineering” is a deceptive metaphor, since in the social realm, it is largely people who are being planned, rather than the inanimate machinery of engineering blueprints. And since every individual is by nature, if not always by law, a self-owner and self-starter—i.e., a self-energizer, this means that central orders, backed up, as they must be under socialism, by force and violence, effectively prohibit all the individuals from doing what they want most or what they believe themselves to be best fitted to do. If the Central Planning Board, in short, orders X and Y to Pinsk to work as truck drivers, this means that X and Y are effectively and coercively prohibited from doing what they would have done voluntarily: perhaps X would have gone to Leningrad to be a longshoreman, and perhaps Y would have stayed around to tinker in his workshop and invent a new and highly useful device.

The latter point brings us to another grave defect of central planning: inventions, innovations, technological developments, by their very nature, by definition, cannot be predicted in advance and therefore cannot be centrally and bureaucratically planned. Not only does no one know what will be invented when; no one knows who will do the inventing. Clearly, a centrally prohibited economy, irrational and inefficient enough for given ends and given means and techniques at any point of time, is all the more incompetent if a flow of inventions and new development are desired in society. Bureaucracy, incompetent enough to plan a stationary system, is vastly more incompetent at planning a progressive one.74

NEW PARAGRAPH

Virtually the central theme of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty is the importance of freedom for innovations and progress, in the widest sense.

,75

• 70See the literature referred to in chapter 10, above, on the economics of socialism. Also John Jewkes, Ordeal by Planning (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1948). For application to Soviet practice, see Boris Brutzkus, Economic Planning in Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 1935) and such recent material as G.F. Ray, “Industrial Planning in Hungary,” Scottish Journal of Political Economy, June, 1960; E. Stuart Kirby, “Economic Planning and Policy in Communist China,” International Affairs, April, 1958; P.J.D. Wiles, “Changing Economic Thought in Poland,” Oxford Economic Papers, June, 1957; Alec Nove, “The Politics of Economic Rationality,” Social Research, Summer, 1958; and especially, Nove, “The Problem of ‘Success Indicators’ in Soviet Industry,” Economica, February, 1958. See below on socialist planning in connection with growth and underdevelopment.
• 71A chief difference is that a formal Communist-style expropriation makes it far more difficult to desocialize later.
• 72The first one to point this out was Ludwig von Mises, in his Human Action, pp. 698–99. It is particularly interesting to find an empirical confirmation in Wiles, dealing with Communist planning:
  What actually happens is that “world prices,” i.e., capitalist world prices, are used in all intra-[Soviet] bloc trade. 
  They are translated into rubles ... and entered into bilateral clearing accounts. To the question, “What would you do if there were no capitalist world?” came only the answer “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” In the case of electricity the bridge is already under their feet; there has been great difficulty in pricing it since there is no world market. (Wiles, “Changing Economic Thought in Poland,” pp. 202–03) On the difficulties encountered by the Soviet bloc in using world market prices, see especially Horst Mendershausen, “The Terms of Soviet-Satellite Trade: A Broadened Analysis,” Review of Economics and Statistics, May, 1960, pp. 152–63.
• 73For an interesting account of the recent growth of organized private enterprises in Soviet Russia, illegal but protected by local graft, see Edward Crankshaw, “Breaking the Law in a Police State: Regimentation Can’t Curb Russians’ Anarchic Spirit,” New York Herald-Tribune, August 17, 1960.
• 74Recent researches have shown the fallacy of the common view that modern inventions and applied technological developments can take place only in very large-scale, even centrally planned, laboratories. See particularly the brilliant work of John Jewkes, David Sawers, and Richard Stillerman, The Sources of Invention (London: Macmillan & Co., 1958). Also see John R. Baker, Science and the Planned State (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1945). For a useful summary of recent literature in this field, see Richard R. Nelson, “The Economics of Invention: A Survey of the Literature,” The Journal of Business, April, 1959, pp. 101–27. Soviet science has, of course, been able to copy the technical achievements of the West; yet, on the inefficiencies of Soviet science, see Baker, Science and the Planned State, and Baker, Science and the Sputniks (London: Society for Freedom in Science, December, 1958). Of interest on the inherent inefficiencies of governmental military research is the Hoover Commission Task Force Report: Subcommittee of the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of Government, Research Activities in the Department of Defense and Defense-Related Agencies (Washington, D.C.: April, 1955). On atomic energy and government, see, in addition to Jewkes, Sawers, and Stillerman, Alfred Bornemann, “Atomic Energy and Enterprise Economics,” Land Economics, August, 1954.
• 75Two of the arguments for government activity most favored by economists are the “collective goods” and “external benefit” arguments. For a critique, see Appendix B below.

In recent years economists and journalists alike have been heavily emphasizing a new concept—”growth,” and much economic writing is engaged in a “numbers game” on what percentage, or “rate of growth,” “we” should have next year or in the next decade. The discussion is replete with comparisons of the higher rate of country X which “we” must hurriedly counter, etc. Amidst all the interest in growth, there are many grave problems which have hardly been touched upon. First and foremost is the simple query: “What is so good about growth?” The economists, discoursing scientifically about growth, have illegitimately smuggled an ethical judgment into their science—an ethical judgment that remains unanalyzed, as if it were self-evident. But why should growth be the highest value for which we can strive? What is the ethical justification? There is no doubt about the fact that growth, taken over as another dubious metaphor from biology, “sounds” good to most people, but this hardly constitutes an adequate ethical analysis. Many things are considered as good, but on the free market every man must choose between different quantities of them and the price for those forgone. Similarly, growth, as we shall presently see, must be balanced and weighed against competing values. Given due consideration, growth would be considered by few people as the only absolute value. If it were, why stop at 5 percent or 8 percent growth per year? Why not 50 percent?

It is completely illegitimate for the economist qua economist simply to endorse growth. What he can do is to contrast what growth means in various social conditions. In a free market, for example, every person chooses how much future growth he wants as compared to present consumption. “Growth,” i.e., a rise in future living standards, can be achieved, as we have implicitly made clear throughout this volume, only in a few definable ways. Either more and better resources can be found, or more and better people can be born, or technology improved, or the capital goods structure must be lengthened and capital multiplied. In practice, since resources need capital to find and develop them, since technological improvement can be applied to production only via capital investment, since entrepreneurial skills act only through investments, and since an increased labor supply is relatively independent of short-run economic considerations and can backfire in Malthusian fashion by lowering per capita output, the only viable way to growth is through increased saving and investment. On the free market, each individual decides how much he wants to save—to increase his future living standards —as against how much he wants to consume in the present. The net resultant of all these voluntary individual decisions is the nation’s or world’s rate of capital investment. The total is a reflection of the voluntary, free decisions of every consumer, of every person. The economist, therefore, has no business endorsing “growth” as an end; if he does so, he is injecting an unscientific, arbitrary value judgment, especially if he does not present an ethical theory in justification. He should simply say that, in a free market, everyone gets as much “growth” as he chooses to obtain; and that, furthermore, the people as a whole benefit greatly from the voluntary savings of others who do the saving and investing.

What happens if the government decides, either by subsidies or by direct government ownership, to try to spur the social rate of growth? Then, the economist should point out, the entire situation changes. No longer does each person elect to “grow” as he thinks best. Now, with compulsory saving and investing, investment can come only at the expense of the forced saving of some individuals. In short, if A, B, and C “grow” because their standard of living rises from compulsory investment, they do so at the expense of D, E, and F, the ones who were compelled to save. No longer can we say that the social standard of living, the standard of living of each active person, rises; under compulsory growth, some people—the coerced savers—clearly and demonstrably lose. They “grow” backward. Here is one reason why government intervention can never raise society’s rate of “growth.” For when individuals act freely on the market, every one of their actions benefits everyone, and so growth is truly “social,” i.e., participated in by everyone in the society. But when government acts to force growth, it is only some who grow at the expense of the retrogression of others. The Wertfrei economist is therefore not permitted to say that “society” grows at all.

Growth, therefore, is demonstrably not the single absolute value for anyone. People on the market all weigh growth against present consumption, just as they weigh work against leisure, and all goods against one another. If we fully realize that there is no such existent entity as “society” apart from individuals, it becomes clear that “society” cannot grow at the expense of imposing losses on some or most of its members. Suppose, for example, that a community exists where the bulk of the population do not want to “grow”; they would rather not work very hard or save very much; instead they would loll under the trees, pick berries, and play games. To advocate the government’s coming on the scene and forcing these people to work and save, in order to “grow” at some time in the future, means to advocate the compulsory lowering of the standard of living of the bulk of the populace in the present and near future. Any sort of achieved production, under this scheme, however great, would not be “growth” for society; instead it would be retrogression, not only for some but for most people. An economist, therefore, cannot scientifically advocate compulsory growth, for what he is really doing is attempting to impose his own ethical views (e.g., more hard work and saving is better than more leisure and berries) on the other members of society by force. These members greatly lose utility as a result.

Furthermore, it must be emphasized again that in cases of coerced saving the saver reaps none of the benefit of his sacrifice, which is instead reaped by government officials or other beneficiaries. This contrasts to the free market, where people save and invest precisely because they will reap some tangible and desired rewards.

In a regime of coerced growth, then, “society” cannot grow, and conditions are totally different from those of the free market. Indeed, what we have is a form of the “free rider” argument against the free market and for government; here the various “free riders” band together to force other people to be thrifty so that the former can benefit.76

Even if we set these problems aside, it is doubtful how much the coercing free riders can benefit from these measures. Many considerations treated above now come into play. In the first place, the growth and success of the compulsory free riders discourage production and shift more and more people and energy from production to the exploitation of production, i.e., to compulsory free riding. Secondly, we have seen that if government itself does the “investing” out of the confiscated savings of others, the result, for many reasons, is not genuine investment, but waste assets. The capital built out of coerced savings, then, instead of benefiting the consumers, is largely wasted and dissipated. Even if government uses the money to subsidize various private investments, the results are still grave; for these investments, being uneconomic in relation to genuine consumers’ demand and profit-and-loss signals on the market, will constitute malinvestment. Once the government removed its subsidies and let all capital compete equally in serving consumers, it is doubtful how much of this investment would survive.

Although we have no intention of dealing here to any extent with an empirical problem like Soviet economic growth, we may illustrate our analysis by noting the hullabaloo that has been raised in recent years over the supposedly enormous rate of Soviet growth. Curiously, one finds that the “growth” seems to be taking place almost exclusively in capital goods, such as iron and steel, hydroelectric dams, etc., whereas little or none of this growth ever seems to filter down to the standard of living of the average Soviet consumer. The consumer’s standard of living, however, is the be-all and end-all of the entire production process. Production makes no sense whatever except as a means to consumption. Investment in capital goods means nothing except as a necessary way station to increased consumption. When capital investment takes place in the free market, it deprives no one of consumption goods; for those save who voluntarily choose investment over some present consumption. No one is required to sacrifice present consumption who does not wish to do so. As a result, the standard of living of everyone rises continually and smoothly as investment increases. But a Soviet or other system of compulsory investment lowers the standard of living of almost everyone, certainly in the near future. And there is every indication that the “pie-in-the-sky” day when living standards finally rise almost never arrives. In short, government “investment,” as we have noted above, turns out to be a peculiar form of wasteful “consumption” by government officials.77

There is another consideration that reinforces our conclusion. Professor Lachmann has been diligently reminding us of what economists generally forget: that “capital” is not just a homogeneous blob that can be added to or subtracted from. Capital is an intricate, delicate, interweaving structure of capital goods. All of the delicate strands of this structure have to fit, and fit precisely, or else malinvestment occurs. The free market is almost an automatic mechanism for such fitting; and we have seen throughout this volume how the free market, with its price system and profit-and-loss criteria, adjusts the output and variety of the different strands of production, preventing any one from getting long out of alignment.78 But under socialism or with massive government investment, there is no such mechanism for fitting and harmonizing. Deprived of a free price system and profit and-loss criteria, the government can only blunder along, blindly “investing” without being able to invest properly in the right fields, the right products, or the right places. A beautiful subway will be built, but no wheels will be available for the trains; a giant dam, but no copper for transmission lines, etc. These sudden surpluses and shortages, so characteristic of government planning, are the result of massive malinvestment by the government.79

The current controversy over growth, is, in a sense, the result of a critical error made by “right-wing” economists in their continuing debate with their “left-wing” opponents. Instead of emphasizing freedom and free choice as their highest political end, the rightist economists have stressed the importance of freedom as a utilitarian means of encouraging saving, investment, and therefore, economic growth. We have seen above that conservative opponents of the progressive income tax have often fallen into the trap of treating saving and investment as somehow a greater and higher good than consumption, and therefore of implicitly criticizing the free market’s saving/consumption ratio. Here we have another example of the same lapse into an implicit, arbitrary criticism of the market. What the modern “leftist” proponents of compulsory growth have done is to use the venerable arguments of the conservatives as a boomerang against them, and to say, in effect, to their opponents: “Very well. You have been maintaining that saving and investment are of critical importance because they lead to growth and economic progress. Fine; but, as you yourselves implicitly grant, the free market’s proportion of saving and investment is really too slow. Why then rely upon it? Why not speed up growth by using government to coerce even more saving and investment, to speed up capital further?” It is evident that conservatives cannot counter by reiterating their familiar arguments. The proper comment here is the analysis we have been expounding—in short: (a) By what right do you maintain that people should grow faster than they voluntarily wish to grow? (b) Compulsory growth will not benefit the whole of society as will freely chosen growth, and it is therefore not “social growth”; some will gain—and gain at some distant date—at the expense of the retrogression of others. (c) Government investment or subsidized investment is either malinvestment or not investment at all, but simply waste assets or “consumption” of waste for the prestige of government officials.

What, in point of fact, is economic “growth”? Any proper definition must surely encompass an increase of economic means available for the satisfaction of people’s ends—in short, increased satisfactions of people’s wants, or as P.T. Bauer has put it, “an increase in the range of effective alternatives open to people.” On such a definition, it is clear that compulsory saving, with its imposed losses and restrictions on people’s effective choices, cannot spur economic growth; and also that government “investment,” with its neglect of voluntary private consumption as its goal, can hardly be said to add to people’s alternatives. Quite the contrary.80

Finally, the very term “growth” is an illegitimate import of a metaphor from biology into human action.81 “Growth” and “rate of growth” connote some sort of automatic necessity or inevitability and have for many people a value-loaded connotation of something self-evidently desirable.82

Concomitantly with the hubbub about growth there has developed an enormous literature about the “economics of underdeveloped countries.” We can here note only a few considerations. First, contrary to a widespread impression, “neoclassical” economics applies just as fully to underdeveloped as to any other countries. In fact, as P. T. Bauer has often stressed, the economic discipline is in some ways sharper in less developed countries because of the extra option that many people have of reverting from a monetary to a barter economy. An underdeveloped country can grow only in the same ways as a more advanced country: largely via capital investment. The economic laws which we have adumbrated throughout this volume are independent of the specific content of any community’s or nation’s economy, and therefore independent of its level of development. Secondly, underdeveloped countries are especially prone to the wasteful, dramatic, prestigious government “investment” in such projects as steel mills or dams, as contrasted with economic, but undramatic, private investment in improved agricultural tools.83 ,84

Thirdly, the term “underdeveloped” is definitely value-loaded to imply that certain countries are “too little” developed below some sort of imposed standard. As Wiggins and Schoeck point out, “undeveloped” would be a more objective term.85

Because of its spectacular burst of popularity, something must here be said of the recent “stages of economic growth” doctrine of Professor Rostow. Highly recommended as “the answer to Marx” (as if Marx had never been “answered” before), Rostow divines five stages of economic growth through which each modern nation passes; these center around the “take-off” and include “preconditions” of take-off, drive from take-off to “maturity,” and, as the final stage, “high mass-consumption.”86 In addition to committing the common fallacy of assuming some sort of automatic rate of “growth,” Rostow adds many others of his own, among which are the following: (a) the resumption of the futile modern search for nonexistent “laws of history”; (b) the discovery of such “laws” by way of that hoary fallacy of late nineteenth-century German thought, “stages of history,” with each arbitrary stage somehow destined to evolve automatically into the next; (c) the undue stress—here, as in other ways, closer to Marx than most critics realize—on sheer technology as the fons et origo of economic development; (d) the deliberate mixing of government and private firms as equally capable of “entrepreneurship”; and (e) reliance on the fallacious concept of “social overhead capital,” which must be mainly supplied by the government before “take-off” is achieved. Actually, as we have seen, there are not different stages of economy, each subject to its own laws, but one single economics which applies to any level of development and explains any degree of “growth.” Rostow’s final stage of “high mass consumption” is particularly open to question. What was more characteristic of the early, “take-off” stage of the Industrial Revolution in Britain than precisely the shift of production toward mass consumption of cheap, factory-made textile goods? Mass consumption was a feature of the Industrial Revolution from the beginning; it is not, contrary to a popular myth, some sort of new condition of the 1950’s.87 ,88

• 76This is the first line of argument for government intervention analyzed in Appendix B below.
• 77In many cases, these “investments” are not simply bureaucratic errors; they pay welcome gains to government officials in “prestige.” Every “underdeveloped” government seems to insist on its steel mill or its dam, for example, regardless whether it is economic or not (therefore usually not). As Professor Friedman astutely points out:
  The Pharaohs raised enormous sums of capital to build the Pyramids; this was capital formation on a grand scale; it certainly did not promote economic development in the fundamental sense of contributing to a self-sustaining growth in the standard of life of the Egyptian masses. Modern Egypt has under government auspices built a steel mill; this involves capital formation; but it is a drain on the economic resources of Egypt ... since the cost of making steel in Egypt is very much greater than the cost of buying it elsewhere; it is simply a modern equivalent of the Pyramids, except that maintenance expenses are higher. (Milton Friedman, “Foreign Economic Aid: Means and Objectives,” Yale Review, Summer, 1958, p. 505)
• 78Cf. L.M. Lachmann, Capital and Its Structure. Also see P.T. Bauer and B.S. Yamey, The Economics of Under-Developed Countries (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1957), pp. 129 ff.
• 79On the subject of compulsory saving and government investment, see the noteworthy article of P.T. Bauer, “The Political Economy of Non-Development” in James W. Wiggins and Helmut Schoeck, eds., Foreign Aid Re-examined (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1958), pp. 129–38. Bauer writes:
  ... if development has meaning as a desirable process, it must refer to an increase in desired output. Governmental collection and investment of saving effect production which is not subject to the test of voluntary purchase at market price. ... Increased output through this method is at best an ambiguous indicator of economic improvement. ... If the capital is not provided voluntarily, this suggests that the population prefers an alternative use of resources, whether current consumption or other forms of investment. (Ibid., pp. 133–34)
• 80P.T. Bauer, Economic Analysis and Policy in Underdeveloped Countries (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1957), pp. 113 ff. On Soviet economic growth Bauer and Yamey make this salutary comment:
  The meaning of national income, industrial output and capital formation is also debatable in an economy when so large a part of output is not governed by consumers’ choices in the market; the difficulties of interpretation are particularly obvious in connection with the huge capital expenditure undertaken by government without reference to the valuation of output by consumers. (Bauer and Yamey, Economics of Under-Developed Countries, p. 162)Also see Friedman, “Foreign Economic Aid,” p. 510.
• 81For a critique of various metaphors illegitimately and misleadingly imported from the natural sciences into economics, see Rothbard, “The Mantle of Science.”
• 82The presumably excessive growth of cancerous cells, for example, is generally overlooked.
• 83The prolific writings of Professor Bauer are a particularly fruitful source of analysis of the problems of the underdeveloped countries. In addition to the references above, see especially Bauer’s excellent United States Aid and Indian Economic Development (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Association, November, 1959); his West African Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954); “Lewis’ Theory of Economic Growth,” American Economic Review, September, 1956, pp. 632–41; “A Reply,” Journal of Political Economy, October, 1956, pp. 435–41; and P.T. Bauer and B.S. Yamey, “The Economics of Marketing Reform,” Journal of Political Economy, June, 1954, pp. 210–34.
       The following quotation from Bauer’s study on India is instructive for its analysis of central planning as well as development:
  As a corollary of reserving a large (and increasing) sector of the economy for the government, private enterprise and investment, both Indian and foreign, are banned from a wide range of industrial and commercial activity. These restrictions and barriers affect not only private Indian investment, but also the entry of foreign capital, enterprise and skill, which inevitably retards economic development. Such measures are thus paradoxical in view of the alleged emphasis on economic advance. (Bauer, United States Aid, p. 43) Bauer’s chief defect is a tendency to underweigh the role of capital in economic development.
• 84It is fascinating to discover, in 1925–26, before Soviet Russia became committed to full socialism and coerced industrialization, Soviet leaders and economists attacking central planning and forced industry and calling for economic reliance on private peasantry. After 1926, however, the Soviet planned economy deliberately planned uneconomically for forced heavy industry in order to establish an autarkic socialism. See Edward H. Carr, Socialism In One Country, 1921–1926 (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1958), I, 259 f., 316, 351, 503–13. On the Hungarian experience, see Ray, “Industrial Planning in Hungary,” pp. 134 ff.
• 85Wiggins and Schoeck, Scientism and Values, p. v. This symposium has many illuminating articles on the whole problem of underdevelop-ment. In addition to the Bauer article cited above, see especially the contributions of Rippy, Groseclose, Stokes, Schoeck, Haberler and Wiggins. Also see the critique of the concept of underdevelopment in Jacob Viner, International Trade and Economic Development (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952), pp. 120 ff.
• 86W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). Perhaps some of the popularity may be due to the term “take-off,” which is certainly in tune with our aeronautical and space-minded age.
• 87On the complex of fallacies involved in the search for “laws of history,” see Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957); for a critique of earlier “stage theories” of economic history, see T.S. Ashton, “The Treatment of Capitalism by Historians” in F.A. Hayek, ed., Capitalism and the Historians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), pp. 57–62. Some of the fallacies of the “social overhead” concept are refuted in Wilson Schmidt, “Social Overhead Mythology” in Wiggins and Schoeck, Scientism and Values, pp. 111–28, although Schmidt himself clings to several. On the superiority of private over government entrepreneurship and innovation, and in significance for development, see Yale Brozen, “Business Leadership and Technological Change,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 1954, pp. 13–30; and Brozen, “Technological Change, Ideology and Productivity,” Political Science Quarterly, December, 1955, pp. 522–42.
       Another Rostow fallacy is the adoption of the late nineteenth-century German theory that a strong centralized state was a necessary precondition for the emergence of Western capitalism. For a partial critique, see Jelle C. Riemersma, “Economic Enterprise and Political Powers After the Reformation,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, July, 1955, pp. 297–308.
       Finally, for a keen and pioneering discussion of many aspects of coerced development, see S. Herbert Frankel, The Economic Impact of Under-Developed Societies (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953). For a contrasting case study of the free-market road to development, see F.C. Benham, “The Growth of Manufacturing in Hong Kong,” International Affairs, October, 1956, pp. 456–63.
• 88For a critique of Rostow, stressing his mechanistic view of history and a technological determinism that neglects the vital ideas creating technology and political institutions, see David McCord Wright, “True Growth Must Come Through Freedom,” Fortune, December, 1959, pp. 137–38, 209–12.

In the early part of the twentieth century, the main indictment of the capitalist system by its intellectual critics was the alleged pervasiveness of “monopoly.” In the 1930’s, mass unemployment and poverty (“one third of a nation”) came to the fore. At the present time growing abundance and prosperity have greatly dimmed the poverty and unemployment theme, and the only serious “monopoly” seems to be that of labor unionism. Let it not be thought, however, that criticism of capitalism has died. Two seemingly contradictory charges are now rife: (a) that capitalism is not “growing” fast enough, and (b) that the trouble with capitalism is that it makes us too “affluent.” Excess wealth has suddenly replaced poverty as the tragic flaw of capitalism.89 At first sight, these latter charges appear contradictory, for capitalism is at one and the same time accused of producing too many goods, and yet of not increasing its production of goods fast enough. The contradiction seems especially glaring when the same critic presses both lines of attack, as is true of the leading critic of the sin of affluence, Professor Galbraith.90 But, as the Wall Street Journal has aptly pointed out, this is not really a contradiction at all; for the excessive affluence is all in the “private sector,” the goods enjoyed by the consumers; the deficiency, or “starvation,” is in the “public sector,” which needs further growth.91

Although The Affluent Society is replete with fallacies, backed by dogmatic assertions and time-honored rhetorical devices in place of reasoned argument,92 the book warrants some consideration here in view of its enormous popularity.

As in the case of most “economists” who attack economic science, Professor Galbraith is an historicist, who believes that economic theory, instead of being grounded on the eternal facts of human nature, is somehow relative to different historical epochs. “Conventional” economic theory, he asserts, was true for the eras before the present, which were times of “poverty”; now, however, we have vaulted from a centuries-long state of poverty into an age of “affluence,” and for such an age, a completely new economic theory is needed. Galbraith also makes the philosophical error of believing that ideas are essentially “refuted by events”; on the contrary, in human action, as contrasted with the natural sciences, ideas can be refuted only by other ideas; events themselves are complex resultants which need to be interpreted by correct ideas.

One of Galbraith’s gravest flaws is the arbitrariness of the categories, which pervade his work, of “poverty” and “affluence.” Nowhere does he define what he means by these terms, and therefore nowhere does he lay down standards by which we can know, even in theory, when we have passed the magic borderland between “poverty” and “affluence” that requires an entirely new economic theory to come into being. The present book and most other economic works make it evident that economic science is not dependent on some arbitrary level of wealth; the basic praxeological laws are true of all men at all times, and the catallactic laws of the exchange economy are true whenever and wherever exchanges are made.

Galbraith makes much of his supposed discovery, suppressed by other economists, that the marginal utility of goods declines as one’s income increases and that therefore a man’s final $1,000 is not worth nearly as much to him as his first—the margin of subsistence. But this knowledge is familiar to most economists, and this book, for example, has included it. The marginal utility of goods certainly declines as our income rises; but the very fact that people continue to work for the final $1,000 and work for more money when the opportunity is available, demonstrates conclusively that the marginal utility of goods is still greater than the marginal disutility of leisure forgone. Galbraith’s hidden fallacy is a quantitative assumption: from the mere fact that the marginal utility of goods falls as one’s income and wealth rise, Galbraith has somehow concluded that it has already fallen to virtually, or really, zero. The fact of decline, however, tells us nothing whatever about the degree of this decline, which Galbraith arbitrarily assumes has been almost total. All economists, even the most “conventional,” know that as incomes have risen in the modern world, workers have chosen to take more and more of that income in the form of leisure. And this should be proof enough that economists have long been familiar with the supposedly suppressed truth that the marginal utility of goods in general tends to decline as their supply increases. But, Galbraith retorts, economists admit that leisure is a consumers’ good, but not that other goods decline in value as their supply increases. Yet this is surely an erroneous contention; what economists know is that, as civilization expands the supply of goods, the marginal utility of goods declines and the marginal utility of leisure forgone (the opportunity cost of labor) increases, so that more and more real income will be “taken” in the form of leisure. There is nothing at all startling, subversive, or revolutionary about this familiar fact.

According to Galbraith, economists willfully ignore the spectre of the satiation of wants. Yet they do so quite properly, because when wants—or rather, wants for exchangeable goods—are truly satiated, we shall all know it soon enough; for, at that point, everyone will cease working, will cease trying to transform land resources into final consumers’ goods. There will be no need to continue producing, because all needs for consumers’ goods will have been supplied—or at least all those which can be produced and exchanged. At this point, everyone will stop work, the market economy—indeed, all economy—will come to an end, means will no longer be scarce in relation to ends, and everyone will bask in paradise. I think it self-evident that this time has not yet arrived and shows no signs of arriving; if it some day should arrive, it will be greeted by economists, as by most other people, not with curses, but with rejoicing. Despite their venerable reputation as practitioners of a “dismal science,” economists have no vested interests, psychological or otherwise, in scarcity.

But, in the meanwhile, this is still a world of scarcity; scarce means have to be applied to alternate ends; labor is still necessary. People still work for their final $1,000 of income and would be happy to accept another $1,000 should it be offered. We would venture another prediction: An informal poll taken among the people, asking whether they would accept, or know what to do with, an extra few thousand dollars of annual (real) income, would find almost no one who would refuse the offer because of excessive affluence or satiety—or for any other reason. Few would be at a loss about what to do with their increased wealth. Professor Galbraith, of course, has an answer to all this. These wants, he says, are not real or genuine ones; they have been “created” in the populace by advertisers, and their wicked clients, the producing businessmen. The very fact of production, through such advertising, “creates” the supposed wants that it supplies.

Galbraith’s entire theory of excess affluence rests on this flimsy assertion that consumer wants are artificially created by business itself. It is an allegation backed only by repetitious assertion and by no evidence whatever—except perhaps for Galbraith’s obvious personal dislike for detergents and tailfins. What is more, the attack on wicked advertising as creating wants and degrading the consumer is surely the most conventional of the conventional wisdom in the anticapitalist’s arsenal.93

There are many fallacies in Galbraith’s conventional attack on advertising. In the first place, it is not true that advertising “creates” wants or demands on the part of the consumers. It certainly tries to persuade consumers to buy the product; but it cannot create wants or demands, because each person must himself adopt the ideas and values on which he acts—whether these ideas or values are sound or unsound. Galbraith here assumes a naive form of determinism—of advertising upon the consumers, and, like all determinists, he leaves an implicit escape clause from the determination for people like himself, who are, unaccountably, not determined by advertising. If there is determinism by advertising, how can some people be determined to rush out and buy the product, while Professor Galbraith is free to resist the advertisements with indignation and to write a book denouncing the advertising?94

Secondly, Galbraith gives us no standard to decide which wants are so “created” and which are legitimate. By his stress on poverty, one might think that all wants above the subsistence level are false wants created by advertising. Of course, he supplies no evidence for this view. But, as we shall see further below, this is hardly consistent with his views on public or governmentally induced wants.

Thirdly, Galbraith fails to distinguish between fulfilling a given want in a better way and inducing new wants. Unless we are to take the extreme and unsupported view that all wants above the subsistence line are “created,” we must note the rather odd behavior attributed to businessmen by Galbraith’s assumptions. Why should businessmen go to the expense, bother, and uncertainty of trying to create new wants, when they could far more easily look for better or cheaper ways of fulfilling wants that consumers already have? If consumers, for example, already have a discernible and discoverable want for a “no-rub cleanser,” it is surely easier and less costly to produce and then advertise a no-rub cleanser than it would be to create some completely new want—say for blue cleansers in particular—and then work very hard and spend a great deal of money on advertising campaigns to try to convince people that they need blue cleansers because blue “is the color of the sky” or for some other artificial reason.95 In short, the Galbraithian view of the business and marketing system makes little or no sense. Rather than go to the expensive, uncertain, and, at bottom, needless, task of trying to find a new want for consumers, business will tend to satisfy those wants that consumers already have, or that they are pretty sure consumers would have if the product were available. Advertising is then used as a means of (a) conveying information to the consumers that the product is now available and telling them what the product will do; and (b) specifically, trying to convince the consumers that this product will satisfy their given want—e.g., will be a no-rub cleanser.

Indeed, our view is the only one that makes sense of the increasingly large quantities of money spent by business on marketing research. Why bother investigating in detail what consumers really want, if all one need do is to create the wants for them by advertising? If, in fact, production really created its own demand through advertising, as Galbraith maintains, business would never again have to worry about losses or bankruptcy or a failure to sell automatically any good that it may arbitrarily choose to produce. Certainly there would be no need for marketing research or for any wondering about what consumers will buy. This image of the world is precisely the reverse of what is occurring. Indeed, precisely because people’s standards of living are moving ever farther past the subsistence line, businessmen are worrying ever more intensely about what consumers want and what they will buy. It is because the range of goods available to the consumers is expanding so much beyond simple staples needed for subsistence, in quantity, quality, and breadth of product substitutes, that businessmen must compete as never before in paying court to the consumer, in trying to obtain his attention: in short, in advertising. Increasing advertising is a function of the increasingly effective range of competition for the consumer’s favor.96

Not only will businessmen tend to produce for and satisfy what they believe are the given wants of consumers, but the consumers, in contrast to voters, as we have seen above, have a direct market test for every piece of advertising that they confront. If they buy the cleanser and find that much rubbing is still required, the product will soon fade into oblivion. Thus, any advertising claims for market products can be and are quickly and readily tested by the consumers. Confronted with these facts, Galbraith could only maintain that the aversion against rubbing was itself generated, in some mysterious and sinister fashion, by business advertising.97

Advertising is one of the areas in which Galbraith, curiously and in glaring self-contradiction, treats private business differently from governmental activities. Thus, while business is supposed to be “creating” consumer wants through advertising, thereby generating an artificial affluence, at the same time the neglected “public sector” is increasingly starved and poverty-stricken. Apparently, Galbraith has never heard of, or refuses to acknowledge the existence of, governmental propaganda. He makes no mention whatever of the hordes of press agents, publicists, and propagandists working for government agencies, bombarding the taxpayers with propaganda which the latter have been forced to support. Since a considerable part of the propaganda is for ever-greater increases in the particular government bureau’s activities, this means that G, the government officials, expropriate T, the bulk of the taxpayers, in order to hire more propagandists for G, to persuade the taxpayers to permit still more funds to be taken from them. And so forth. It is strange that, while waxing indignant over detergent and automobile commercials over television, Professor Galbraith has never had to endure the tedium of “public service commercials” beamed at him from the government. We may pass over the Washington conferences for influential private organizations that serve as “transmission belts” for government propaganda to the grassroots, the “inside briefings” that perform the same function, the vast quantities of printed matter subsidized by the taxpayer and issued by the government, etc.

Indeed, not only does Galbraith not consider government propaganda as artificially want-creating (and this is a realm, let us remember, where consumers have no market test of the product), but one of his major proposals is for a vast program of what he calls “investment in men,” which turns out to be large-scale governmental “education” to uplift the wants and tastes of the citizenry. In short, Galbraith wants society’s objective to be the deliberate expansion of the “New Class” (roughly, intellectuals, who are blithely assumed to be the only ones who really enjoy their work), “with its emphasis on education and its ultimate effect on intellectual, literary, cultural and artistic demands. ...”98

It seems evident that, while the free market and business are accused of artificially creating consumer wants, the shoe is precisely on Galbraith’s own foot. It is Galbraith who is eager to curtail and suppress the consumers’ freely chosen wants, and who is advocating a massive and coercive attempt by the government to create artificial wants, to “invest in men” by “educating” them to redirect their wants into those refined and artistic channels of which Professor Galbraith is so fond. Everyone will have to give up his tailfins so that all may be compelled to ... read books (like The Affluent Society, for example?).

There are other grave and fundamental fallacies in Galbraith’s approach to government. In particular, after making much ado over the fact that, with poverty conquered, the marginal utility of further goods is lower, he finds that everything somehow works in reverse for “governmental needs.” Governmental needs, in some mystical way, are exempt from this law of diminishing marginal wants; instead, mirabile dictu, governmental needs increase in urgency as society becomes more affluent. From this flagrant and unresolved contradiction, Galbraith leaps to the conclusion that government must compel the massive shifting of resources from superfluous private, to starved public, needs. But on the basis of diminishing marginal utility alone, there is no case for such a shift, since all wants at a higher real income are of lower utility than the wants of the poverty-stricken. And when we realize that if we talk about “created” wants at all, governmental propaganda is vastly more likely to “create” wants than is business, a case, even in Galbraith’s own terms, can be made for just the reverse: for a shift from the governmental to the private sector. And, finally, Galbraith, in his lament for the starved and underprivileged public sector, somehow neglects to inform his readers that, whatever statistics are used, it is clear that, in the past half-century, government activity has increased far more than private. Government is absorbing and confiscating a far greater share of the national product than in earlier days. How much lower its “utility,” and how much greater the case, in Galbraith’s terms, for a shift from government to private activity!

Galbraith also airily assumes, in common with many other writers, that many governmental services are “collective goods” and therefore simply cannot be supplied by private enterprise. Without going further into the question of the desirability of private enterprise in these fields, one must note that Galbraith is quite wrong. Not only is his thesis simply a bald assertion, unsupported by facts, but, on the contrary, every single service generally assumed to be suppliable by government alone has been historically supplied by private enterprise. This includes such services as education, road building and maintenance, coinage, postal delivery, fire protection, police protection, judicial decisions, and military defense—all of which are often held to be self-evidently and necessarily within the exclusive province of government.99

There are many other important fallacies in Galbraith’s book, but the central thesis of The Affluent Society has now been discussed. Thus, one of the reasons why Galbraith sees great danger in the present high consumption is that much is financed by consumer credit, which Galbraith considers, in the conventional manner, to be “inflationary” and to lead to instability and depression. Yet, as we shall see further, consumer credit that does not add to the money supply is not inflationary; it simply permits consumers to redirect the pattern of their spending so as to buy more of what they want and ascend higher in their value scales. In short, they may redirect spending from nondurable to durable goods. This is a transfer of spending power, not an inflationary rise. The device of consumer credit was a highly productive invention.

Predictably, Galbraith pours much of his scorn on the supply-and-demand explanation of inflation, and especially on the proper monetary explanation, which he terms “mystical.” His view of depression is purely Keynesian and assumes that a depression is caused by a deficiency of aggregate demand. “Inflation” is an increase in prices, which he would combat either by reducing aggregate demand through high taxes or by selective price controls and the fixing, by compulsory arbitration, of important wages and prices. If the former route is chosen, Galbraith, as a Keynesian, believes that unemployment would ensue. But Galbraith is not really worried, for he would take the revolutionary step of separating income from production; production, it seems, is important only because it provides income. (We have seen that government activity has already effected a considerable separation.) He proposes a sliding scale of unemployment insurance provided by the government, to be greater in depression than in boom, the payment in depression rising almost to the general prevailing wage (for some reason, Galbraith would not go precisely as high, because of a lingering fear of some disincentive effect on the unemployed’s finding jobs). He does not seem to realize that this is merely a way of aggravating and prolonging unemployment during a depression and indirectly subsidizing union wage scales above the market. There is no need to stress the author’s other vagaries, such as his adoption of the conventional conservationist concern about using up precious resources—a position, of course, consistent with Galbraith’s general attack on the private consumer.100

As we have indicated above, there is a problem of the “public sector”; scarcities and conflicts keep appearing in government services, and in these fields alone, e.g., juvenile delinquency, traffic jams, overcrowded schools, lack of parking space, etc. We have seen above that the single remedy that proponents of government activity can offer is for more funds to be channeled from private to public activity.101 We have shown, however, that such scarcity and inefficiency are inherent in government operation of any activity. Instead of taking warning from the inefficiencies of government output, writers like Galbraith turn the blame from government onto the taxpayers and consumers, just as government water officials characteristically blame the consumers for water shortages. At no time does Galbraith so much as consider the possibility of mending an ailing public sector by making that sector private.

How would Galbraith know when his desired “social balance” was achieved? What criteria has he set to guide us in knowing how much shift there should be from private to public activity? The answer is, none; Galbraith cheerfully concedes that there is no way of finding the point of optimum balance: “No test can be applied, for none exists.” But, after all, precise definitions, “precise equilibrium,” are not important; for to Galbraith it is crystal “clear” that we must move now from private to public activity, and to a “considerable” extent. We shall know when we arrive, for the public sector will then bask in opulence. And to think that Galbraith accuses the perfectly sound and logical monetary theory of inflation of being “mystical” and “unrevealed magic”!102

Before leaving the question of affluence and the recent attack on consumption—the very goal of the entire economic system, let us note two stimulating contributions in recent years on hidden but important functions of luxury consumption, particularly by the “rich.” F.A. Hayek has pointed out the important function of the luxury consumption of the rich, at any given time, in pioneering new ways of consumption, and thereby paving the way for later diffusion of such “consumption innovations” to the mass of the consumers.103 And Bertrand de Jouvenel, stressing the fact that refined esthetic and cultural tastes are concentrated precisely in the more affluent members of society, also points out that these citizens are the ones who could freely and voluntarily give many gratuitous services to others, services which, because they are free, are not counted in the national income statistics.104

• 89This performance leads one to believe that Schumpeter was right when he declared:
  ... capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense may produce is a change in the indictment. (Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 144)
• 90John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958).
• 91“Fable for Our Times,” Wall Street Journal, April 21, 1960, p. 12. Thus Galbraith, ibid., deplores the government’s failure to “invest more” in scientists and scientific research to promote our growth, while also attacking American affluence. It turns out, however, that Galbraith wants more of precisely that kind of research which can have no possible commercial application.
• 92Galbraith’s major rhetorical device may be called “the sustained sneer,” which includes (a) presenting an opposing argument so sardonically as to make it seem patently absurd, with no need for reasoned refutation; (b) coining and reiterating Veblenesque names of disparagement, e.g., “the conventional wisdom”; and (c) ridiculing the opposition further by psychological ad hominem attacks, i.e., accusing opponents of having a psychological vested interest in their absurd doctrines—this mode of attack being now more fashionable than older accusations of economic venality. The “conventional wisdom” encompasses just about everything with which Galbraith disagrees.
• 93In addition to wicked advertising, wants are also artificially created, according to Galbraith, by emulation of one’s neighbor: “Keeping up with the Joneses.” But, in the first place, what is wrong with such emulation, except an unsupported ethical judgment of Galbraith’s? Galbraith pretends to ground his theory, not on his private ethical judgment, but on the alleged creation of wants by production itself. Yet simple emulation would not be a function of producers, but of consumers themselves—unless emulation, too, were inspired by advertising. But this reduces to the criticism of advertising discussed in the text. And secondly, where did the original Jones obtain his wants? Regardless of how many people have wants purely in emulation of others, some person or persons must have originally had these wants as genuine needs of their very own. Otherwise the argument is hopelessly circular. Once this is conceded, it is impossible for economics to decide to what extent each want is pervaded by emulation.
• 94For more on determinism and the sciences of human action, see Rothbard, “Mantle of Science,” and Mises, Theory and History.
• 95Professor Abbott, in his important book on competition, quality of products, and the business system, put it this way:
  The producers will generally find it easier and less costly to gain sales by adapting the product as closely as possible to existing tastes and by directing advertising to those whose wants it is already well equipped to satisfy than by attempting to alter human beings to fit the product. (Abbott, Quality and Competition, p. 74)
• 96Recent writings by marketing experts on “the marketing revolution” now under way stress precisely this increasing competition for, and courting of, the favor and custom of the consumer. Thus, see Robert J. Keith, “The Marketing Revolution,” Journal of Marketing, January, 1960, pp. 35–38; Goldman, “Product Differentiation and Advertising: Some Lessons From Soviet Experience,” and Goldman, “Marketing—a Lesson for Marx,” Harvard Business Review, January–February, 1960, pp. 79–86.
• 97On the alleged powers of business advertising, it is well to note these pungent comments of Ludwig von Mises:
  It is a widespread fallacy that skillful advertising can talk the consumers into buying everything that the advertiser wants them to buy. ... However, nobody believes that any kind of advertising would have succeeded in making the candlemakers hold the field against the electric bulb, the horse-drivers against the motorcars, the goose quill against the steel pen and later against the fountain pen. (Mises, Human Action, p. 317) For a critique of the notion of the “hidden persuaders,” see Raymond A. Bauer, “Limits of Persuasion,” Harvard Business Review, September–October, 1958, pp. 105–10.
• 98Galbraith, Affluent Society, p. 345. In proposing this large-scale creation of an intellectual class, Galbraith virtually ignores the artificiality of educating people beyond their interests, capacities, or job opportunities available.
• 99Since this would take us far afield indeed, we can mention here only one reference: to the successful development of the road and canal networks of eighteenth-century England by private road, canal, and navigation improvement companies. See T.S. Ashton, An Economic History of England: The 18th Century (New York: Barnes and Noble, n.d.), pp. 72–81. On the fallacy of “collective goods,” only suppliable by the government, see Appendix B below.
• 100Amidst the tangle of Galbraith’s remaining fallacies and errors, we might mention one: his curious implication that Professor von Mises is a businessman. For first Galbraith talks of the age-old hostility between businessmen and intellectuals, backs this statement by quoting Mises as critical of many intellectuals, and then concedes that “most businessmen” would regard Mises as “rather extreme.” But since Mises is certainly not a businessman, it is odd to see his statements used as evidence for businessman-intellectual enmity. Galbraith, Affluent Society, pp. 184–85. This peculiar error is shared by Galbraith’s Harvard colleagues, whose work he cites favorably, and who persist in quoting such nonbusinessmen as Henry Hazlitt and Dr. F.A. Harper as spokesmen for the “classical business creed.” See Francis X. Sutton, Seymour E. Harris, Carl Kaysen, and James Tobin, The American Business Creed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956).
       The Affluent Society is a work that particularly lends itself to satire, and this has been cleverly supplied in “The Sumptuary Manifesto,” The Journal of Law and Economics, October, 1959, pp. 120–23.
• 101See pp. 944ff., of this chapter.
• 102A brief, and therefore bald, version of Galbraith’s thesis may be found in John Kenneth Galbraith, “Use of Income That Economic Growth Makes Possible ...” in Problems of United States Economic Development (New York: Committee for Economic Development, January, 1958), pp. 201–06. In the same collection of essays there is in some ways a more extreme statement of the same position by Professor Moses Abramovitz, who presses even further to denounce leisure as threatening to deprive us of that “modicum of purposive, disciplined activity which ... gives savor to our lives.” Moses Abramovitz, “Economic Goals and Social Welfare in the Next Generation,” ibid., p. 195. It is perhaps apropos to note a strong resemblance between coerced deprivation of leisure and slavery, as well as to remark that the only society that can genuinely “invest in men” is a society where slavery abounds. In fact, Galbraith writes almost wistfully of a slave system for this reason. Affluent Society, pp. 274–75.
       In addition to Galbraith and Abramovitz, other “Galbraithian” papers in the CED Symposium are those of Professor David Riesman and especially Sir Roy Harrod, who is angry at “touts,” the British brand of advertiser. Like Galbraith, Harrod would also launch a massive government education program to “teach” people how to use their leisure in the properly refined and esthetic manner. This contrasts to Abramovitz, who would substitute a bracing discipline of work for expanding leisure. But then again, one suspects that the bulk of the people would find a coerced Harrodian esthetic just as disciplinary. Galbraith, Problems of United States Economic Development, I, 207–13, 223–34.
• 103Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, pp. 42ff. As Hayek puts it:
  A large part of the expenditure of the rich, though not intended for that end, thus serves to defray the cost of the experimentation with the new things that, as a result, can later be made available to the poor.
  The important point is not merely that we gradually learn to make cheaply on a large scale what we already know how to make expensively in small quantities but that only from an advanced position does the next range of desires and possibilities become visible, so that the selection of new goals and the effort toward their achievement will begin long before the majority can strive for them. (Ibid., pp. 43–44) 
        Also see the similar point made by Mises 30 years before. Ludwig von Mises, “The Nationalization of Credit” in Sommer, Essays in European Economic Thought, pp. 111f. And see Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Ethics of Redistribution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), pp. 38 f.
• 104De Jouvenel, Ethics of Redistribution, especially pp. 67 ff. If all housewives suddenly stopped doing their own housework and, instead, hired themselves out to their next-door neighbors, the supposed increase in national product, as measured by statistics, would be very great, even though the actual increase would be nil. For more on this point, see de Jouvenel, “The Political Economy of Gratuity,” The Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn, 1959, pp. 515 ff.

In chapter 11, we depicted the workings of the monetary system of a purely free market. A free money market adopts specie, either gold or silver or both parallel, as the “standard” or money proper. Units of money are simply units of weight of the money-stuff. The total stock of the money commodity increases with new production (mining) and decreases from wear and tear and use in industrial employments. Generally, there will be a gradual secular rise in the money stock, with effects as analyzed above. The wealth of some people will increase and of others will decline, and no social usefulness will accrue from an increased supply of money—in its monetary use. However, an increased stock will raise the social standard of living and well-being by further satisfying nonmonetary demands for the monetary metal.

Intervention in this money market usually takes the form of issuing pseudo warehouse receipts as money-substitutes. As we saw in chapter 11, demand liabilities such as deposits or paper notes may come into use in a free market, but may equal only the actual value, or weight, of the specie deposited. The demand liabilities are then genuine warehouse receipts, or true money certificates, and they pass on the market as representatives of the actual money, i.e., as money-substitutes. Pseudo warehouse receipts are those issued in excess of the actual weight of specie on deposit. Naturally, their issue can be a very lucrative business. Looking like the genuine certificates, they serve also as money-substitutes, even though not covered by specie. They are fraudulent, because they promise to redeem in specie at face value, a promise that could not possibly be met were all the deposit-holders to ask for their own property at the same time. Only the complacency and ignorance of the public permit the situation to continue.105

Broadly, such intervention may be effected either by the government or by private individuals and firms in their role as “banks” or money-warehouses. The process of issuing pseudo warehouse receipts or, more exactly, the process of issuing money beyond any increase in the stock of specie, may be called inflation.106 A contraction in the money supply outstanding over any period (aside from a possible net decrease in specie) may be called deflation. Clearly, inflation is the primary event and the primary purpose of monetary intervention. There can be no deflation without an inflation having occurred in some previous period of time. A priori, almost all intervention will be inflationary. For not only must all monetary intervention begin with inflation; the great gain to be derived from inflation comes from the issuer’s putting new money into circulation. The profit is practically costless, because, while all other people must either sell goods and services and buy or mine gold, the government or the commercial banks are literally creating money out of thin air. They do not have to buy it. Any profit from the use of this magical money is clear gain to the issuers.

As happens when new specie enters the market, the issue of “uncovered” money-substitutes also has a diffusion effect: the first receivers of the new money gain the most, the next gain slightly less, etc., until the midpoint is reached, and then each receiver loses more and more as he waits for the new money. For the first individuals’ selling prices soar while buying prices remain almost the same; but later, buying prices have risen while selling prices remain unchanged. A crucial circumstance, however, differentiates this from the case of increasing specie. The new paper or new demand deposits have no social function whatever; they do not demonstrably benefit some without injuring others in the market society. The increasing money supply is only a social waste and can only advantage some at the expense of others. And the benefits and burdens are distributed as just outlined: the early-comers gaining at the expense of later-comers. Certainly, the business and consumer borrowers from the bank—its clientele—benefit greatly from the new money (at least in the short run), since they are the ones who first receive it.

If inflation is any increase in the supply of money not matched by an increase in the gold or silver stock available, the method of inflation just depicted is called credit expansion—the creation of new money-substitutes, entering the economy on the credit market. As will be seen below, while credit expansion by a bank seems far more sober and respectable than outright spending of new money, it actually has far graver consequences for the economic system, consequences which most people would find especially undesirable. This inflationary credit is called circulating credit, as distinguished from the lending of saved funds— called commodity credit. In this book, the term “credit expansion” will apply only to increases in circulating credit.

Credit expansion has, of course, the same effect as any sort of inflation: prices tend to rise as the money supply increases. Like any inflation, it is a process of redistribution, whereby the inflators, and the part of the economy selling to them, gain at the expense of those who come last in line in the spending process. This is the charm of inflation—for the beneficiaries—and the reason why it has been so popular, particularly since modern banking processes have camouflaged its significance for those losers who are far removed from banking operations. The gains to the inflators are visible and dramatic; the losses to others hidden and unseen, but just as effective for all that. Just as half the economy are taxpayers and half tax-consumers, so half the economy are inflation-payers and the rest inflation-consumers.

Most of these gains and losses will be “short-run” or “one-shot”; they will occur during the process of inflation, but will cease after the new monetary equilibrium is reached. The inflators make their gains, but after the new money supply has been diffused throughout the economy, the inflationary gains and losses are ended. However, as we have seen in chapter 11, there are also permanent gains and losses resulting from inflation. For the new monetary equilibrium will not simply be the old one multiplied in all relations and quantities by the addition to the money supply. This was an assumption that the old “quantity theory” economists made. The valuations of the individuals making temporary gains and losses will differ. Therefore, each individual will react differently to his gains and losses and alter his relative spending patterns accordingly. Moreover, the new money will form a high ratio to the existing cash balance of some and a low ratio to that of others, and the result will be a variety of changes in spending patterns. Therefore, all prices will not have increased uniformly in the new equilibrium; the purchasing power of the monetary unit has fallen, but not equiproportionally over the entire array of exchange-values. Since some prices have risen more than others, therefore, some people will be permanent gainers, and some permanent losers, from the inflation.107

Particularly hard hit by an inflation, of course, are the relatively “fixed” income groups, who end their losses only after a long period or not at all. Pensioners and annuitants who have contracted for a fixed money income are examples of permanent as well as short-run losers. Life insurance benefits are permanently slashed. Conservative anti-inflationists’ complaints about “the widows and orphans” have often been ridiculed, but they are no laughing matter nevertheless. For it is precisely the widows and orphans who bear a main part of the brunt of inflation.108 Also suffering losses are creditors who have already extended their loans and find it too late to charge a purchasing-power premium on their interest rates.

Inflation also changes the market’s consumption/investment ratio. Superficially, it seems that credit expansion greatly increases capital, for the new money enters the market as equivalent to new savings for lending. Since the new “bank money” is apparently added to the supply of savings on the credit market, businesses can now borrow at a lower rate of interest; hence inflationary credit expansion seems to offer the ideal escape from time preference, as well as an inexhaustible fount of added capital. Actually, this effect is illusory. On the contrary, inflation reduces saving and investment, thus lowering society’s standard of living. It may even cause large-scale capital consumption. In the first place, as we just have seen, existing creditors are injured. This will tend to discourage lending in the future and thereby discourage saving-investment. Secondly, as we have seen in chapter 11, the inflationary process inherently yields a purchasing-power profit to the businessman, since he purchases factors and sells them at a later time when all prices are higher. The businessman may thus keep abreast of the price increase (we are here exempting from variations in price increases the terms-of-trade component), neither losing nor gaining from the inflation. But business accounting is traditionally geared to a world where the value of the monetary unit is stable. Capital goods purchased are entered in the asset column “at cost,” i.e., at the price paid for them. When the firm later sells the product, the extra inflationary gain is not really a gain at all; for it must be absorbed in purchasing the replaced capital good at a higher price. Inflation, therefore, tricks the businessman: it destroys one of his main signposts and leads him to believe that he has gained extra profits when he is just able to replace capital. Hence, he will undoubtedly be tempted to consume out of these profits and thereby unwittingly consume capital as well. Thus, inflation tends at once to repress saving-investment and to cause consumption of capital.

The accounting error stemming from inflation has other economic consequences. The firms with the greatest degree of error will be those with capital equipment bought more preponderantly when prices were lowest. If the inflation has been going on for a while, these will be the firms with the oldest equipment. Their seemingly great profits will attract other firms into the field, and there will be a completely unjustified expansion of investment in a seemingly high-profit area. Conversely, there will be a deficiency of investment elsewhere. Thus, the error distorts the market’s system of allocating resources and reduces its effectiveness in satisfying the consumer. The error will also be greatest in those firms with a greater proportion of capital equipment to product, and similar distorting effects will take place through excessive investment in heavily “capitalized” industries, offset by underinvestment elsewhere.109

• 105Although it has obvious third-person effects, this type of intervention is essentially binary because the issuer, or intervener, gains at the expense of individual holders of legitimate money. The “lines of force” radiate from the interveners to each of those who suffer losses.
• 106Inflation, in this work, is explicitly defined to exclude increases in the stock of specie. While these increases have such similar effects as raising the prices of goods, they also differ sharply in other effects: (a) simple increases in specie do not constitute an intervention in the free market, penalizing one group and subsidizing another; and (b) they do not lead to the processes of the business cycle.
• 107Cf. Mises, Theory of Money and Credit, pp. 140–42.
• 108The avowed goal of Keynes’ inflationist program was the “euthanasia of the rentier.” Did Keynes realize that he was advocating the not-so-merciful annihilation of some of the most unfit-for-labor groups in the entire population—groups whose marginal value productivity consisted almost exclusively in their savings? Keynes, General Theory, p. 376.
• 109For an interesting discussion of some aspects of the accounting error, see W.T. Baxter, “The Accountant’s Contribution to the Trade Cycle,” Economica, May, 1955, pp. 99–112. Also see Mises, Theory of Money and Credit, pp. 202–04; and Human Action, pp. 546 f.

We have already seen in chapter 8 what happens when there is net saving-investment: an increase in the ratio of gross investment to consumption in the economy. Consumption expenditures fall, and the prices of consumers’ goods fall. On the other hand, the production structure is lengthened, and the prices of original factors specialized in the higher stages rise. The prices of capital goods change like a lever being pivoted on a fulcrum at its center; the prices of consumers’ goods fall most, those of first-order capital goods fall less; those of highest-order capital goods rise most, and the others less. Thus, the price differentials between the stages of production all diminish. Prices of original factors fall in the lower stages and rise in the higher stages, and the nonspecific original factors (mainly labor) shift partly from the lower to the higher stages. Investment tends to be centered in lengthier processes of production. The drop in price differentials is, as we have seen, equivalent to a fall in the natural rate of interest, which, of course, leads to a corollary drop in the loan rate. After a while the fruit of the more productive techniques arrives; and the real income of everyone rises.

Thus, an increase in saving resulting from a fall in time preferences leads to a fall in the interest rate and another stable equilibrium situation with a longer and narrower production structure. What happens, however, when the increase in investment is not due to a change in time preference and saving, but to credit expansion by the commercial banks? Is this a magic way of expanding the capital structure easily and costlessly, without reducing present consumption? Suppose that six million gold ounces are being invested, and four million consumed, in a certain period of time. Suppose, now, that the banks in the economy expand credit and increase the money supply by two million ounces. What are the consequences? The new money is loaned to businesses.110 These businesses, now able to acquire the money at a lower rate of interest, enter the capital goods’ and original factors’ market to bid resources away from the other firms. At any given time, the stock of goods is fixed, and the two million new ounces are therefore employed in raising the prices of producers’ goods. The rise in prices of capital goods will be imputed to rises in original factors.

The credit expansion reduces the market rate of interest. This means that price differentials are lowered, and, as we have seen in chapter 8, lower price differentials raise prices in the highest stages of production, shifting resources to these stages and also increasing the number of stages. As a result, the production structure is lengthened. The borrowing firms are led to believe that enough funds are available to permit them to embark on projects formerly unprofitable. On the free market, investment will always take place first in those projects that satisfy the most urgent wants of the consumers. Then the next most urgent wants are satisfied, etc. The interest rate regulates the temporal order of choice of projects in accordance with their urgency. A lower rate of interest on the market is a signal that more projects can be undertaken profitably. Increased saving on the free market leads to a stable equilibrium of production at a lower rate of interest. But not so with credit expansion: for the original factors now receive increased money income. In the free-market example, total money incomes remained the same. The increased expenditure on higher stages was offset by decreased expenditure in the lower stages. The “increased length” of the production structure was compensated by the “reduced width.” But credit expansion pumps new money into the production structure: aggregate money incomes increase instead of remaining the same. The production structure has lengthened, but it has also remained as wide, without contraction of consumption expenditure.

The owners of the original factors, with their increased money income, naturally hasten to spend their new money. They allocate this spending between consumption and investment in accordance with their time preferences. Let us assume that the time-preference schedules of the people remain unchanged. This is a proper assumption, since there is no reason to assume that they have changed because of the inflation. Production now no longer reflects voluntary time preferences. Business has been led by credit expansion to invest in higher stages, as if more savings were available. Since they are not, business has overinvested in the higher stages and underinvested in the lower. Consumers act promptly to re-establish their time preferences—their preferred investment/consumption proportions and price differentials. The differentials will be re-established at the old, higher amount, i.e., the rate of interest will return to its free-market magnitude. As a result, the prices at the higher stages of production will fall drastically, the prices at the lower stages will rise again, and the entire new investment at the higher stages will have to be abandoned or sacrificed.

Altering our oversimplified example, which has treated only two stages, we see that the highest stages, believed profitable, have proved to be unprofitable. The pure rate of interest, reflecting consumer desires, is shown to have really been higher all along. The banks’ credit expansion had tampered with that indispensable “signal”—the interest rate—that tells businessmen how much savings are available and what length of projects will be profitable. In the free market the interest rate is an indispensable guide, in the time dimension, to the urgency of consumer wants. But bank intervention in the market disrupts this free price and renders entrepreneurs unable to satisfy consumer desires properly or to estimate the most beneficial time structure of production. As soon as the consumers are able, i.e., as soon as the increased money enters their hands, they take the opportunity to re-establish their time preferences and therefore the old differentials and investment-consumption ratios. Overinvestment in the highest stages, and underinvestment in the lower stages are now revealed in all their starkness. The situation is analogous to that of a contractor misled into believing that he has more building material than he really has and then awakening to find that he has used up all his material on a capacious foundation (the higher stages), with no material left to complete the house.111 Clearly, bank credit expansion cannot increase capital investment by one iota. Investment can still come only from savings.

It should not be surprising that the market tends to revert to its preferred ratios. The same process, as we have seen, takes place in all prices after a change in the money stock. Increased money always begins in one area of the economy, raising prices there, and filters and diffuses eventually over the whole economy, which then roughly returns to an equilibrium pattern conforming to the value of the money. If the market then tends to return to its preferred price-ratios after a change in the money supply, it should be evident that this includes a return to its preferred saving-investment ratio, reflecting social time preferences.

It is true, of course, that time preferences may alter in the interim, either for each individual or as a result of the redistribution during the change. The gainers may save more or less than the losers would have done. Therefore, the market will not return precisely to the old free-market interest rate and investment/consumption ratio, just as it will not return to its precise pattern of prices. It will revert to whatever the free-market interest rate is now, as determined by current time preferences. Some advocates of coercing the market into saving and investing more than it wishes have hailed credit expansion as leading to “forced saving,” thereby increasing the capital-goods structure. But this can happen, not as a direct consequence of credit expansion, but only because effective time preferences have changed in that direction (i.e., time-preference schedules have shifted, or relatively more money is now in the hands of those with low time preferences). Credit expansion may well lead to the opposite effect: the gainers may have higher time preferences, in which case the free-market interest rate will be higher than before. Because these effects of credit expansion are completely uncertain and depend on the concrete data of each particular case, it is clearly far more cogent for advocates of forced saving to use the taxation process to make their redistribution.

The market therefore reacts to a distortion of the free-market interest rate by proceeding to revert to that very rate. The distortion caused by credit expansion deceives businessmen into believing that more savings are available and causes them to malinvest—to invest in projects that will turn out to be unprofitable when consumers have a chance to reassert their true preferences. This reassertion takes place fairly quickly—as soon as owners of factors receive their increased incomes and spend them.

This theory permits us to resolve an age-old controversy among economists: whether an increase in the money supply can lower the market rate of interest. To the mercantilists—and to the Keynesians—it was obvious that an increased money stock permanently lowered the rate of interest (given the demand for money). To the classicists it was obvious that changes in the money stock could affect only the value of the monetary unit, and not the rate of interest. The answer is that an increase in the supply of money does lower the rate of interest when it enters the market as credit expansion, but only temporarily. In the long run (and this long run is not very “long”), the market re-establishes the free-market time-preference interest rate and eliminates the change. In the long run a change in the money stock affects only the value of the monetary unit.

This process—by which the market reverts to its preferred interest rate and eliminates the distortion caused by credit expansion—is, moreover, the business cycle! Our analysis therefore permits the solution, not only of the theoretical problem of the relation between money and interest, but also of the problem that has plagued society for the last century and a half and more—the dread business cycle. And, furthermore, the theory of the business cycle can now be explained as a subdivision of our general theory of the economy.

Note the hallmarks of this distortion-reversion process. First, the money supply increases through credit expansion; then businesses are tempted to malinvest—overinvesting in higher-stage and durable production processes. Next, the prices and incomes of original factors increase and consumption increases, and businesses realize that the higher-stage investments have been wasteful and unprofitable. The first stage is the chief landmark of the “boom”; the second stage—the discovery of the wasteful malinvestments—is the “crisis.” The depression is the next stage, during which malinvested businesses become bankrupt, and original factors must suddenly shift back to the lower stages of production. The liquidation of unsound businesses, the “idle capacity” of the malinvested plant, and the “frictional” unemployment of original factors that must suddenly and en masse shift to lower stages of production—these are the chief hallmarks of the depression stage.

We have seen in chapter 11 that the major unexplained features of the business cycle are the mass of error and the concentration of error and disturbance in the capital-goods industries. Our theory of the business cycle solves both of these problems. The cluster of error suddenly revealed by entrepreneurs is due to the interventionary distortion of a key market signal—the interest rate. The concentration of disturbance in the capital-goods industries is explained by the spur to unprofitable higher-order investments in the boom period. And we have just seen that other characteristics of the business cycle are explained by this theory.

One point should be stressed: the depression phase is actually the recovery phase. Most people would be happy to keep the boom period, where the inflationary gains are visible and the losses hidden and obscure. This boom euphoria is heightened by the capital consumption that inflation promotes through illusory accounting profits. The stages that people complain about are the crisis and depression. But the latter periods, it should be clear, do not cause the trouble. The trouble occurs during the boom, when malinvestments and distortions take place; the crisis-depression phase is the curative period, after people have been forced to recognize the malinvestments that have occurred. The depression period, therefore, is the necessary recovery period; it is the time when bad investments are liquidated and mistaken entrepreneurs leave the market—the time when “consumer sovereignty” and the free market reassert themselves and establish once again an economy that benefits every participant to the maximum degree. The depression period ends when the free-market equilibrium has been restored and expansionary distortion eliminated.

It should be clear that any governmental interference with the depression process can only prolong it, thus making things worse from almost everyone’s point of view. Since the depression process is the recovery process, any halting or slowing down of the process impedes the advent of recovery. The depression readjustments must work themselves out before recovery can be complete. The more these readjustments are delayed, the longer the depression will have to last, and the longer complete recovery is postponed. For example, if the government keeps wage rates up, it brings about permanent unemployment. If it keeps prices up, it brings about unsold surplus. And if it spurs credit expansion again, then new malinvestment and later depressions are spawned.

Many nineteenth-century economists referred to the business cycle in a biological metaphor, likening the depression to a painful but necessary curative of the alcoholic or narcotic jag which is the boom, and asserting that any tampering with the depression delays recovery. They have been widely ridiculed by present-day economists. The ridicule is misdirected, however, for the biological analogy is in this case correct.

One obvious conclusion from our analysis is the absurdity of the “underconsumptionist” remedies for depression—the idea that the crisis is caused by underconsumption and that the way to cure the depression is to stimulate consumption expenditures. The reverse is clearly the truth. What has brought about the crisis is precisely the fact that entrepreneurial investment erroneously anticipated greater savings, and that this error is revealed by consumers’ re-establishing their desired proportion of consumption. “Overconsumption” or “undersaving” has brought about the crisis, although it is hardly fair to pin the guilt on the consumer, who is simply trying to restore his preferences after the market has been distorted by bank credit. The only way to hasten the curative process of the depression is for people to save and invest more and consume less, thereby finally justifying some of the malinvestments and mitigating the adjustments that have to be made.

One problem has been left unexplained. We have seen that the reversion period is short and that factor incomes increase rather quickly and start restoring the free-market consumption/saving ratios. But why do booms, historically, continue for several years? What delays the reversion process? The answer is that as the boom begins to peter out from an injection of credit expansion, the banks inject a further dose. In short, the only way to avert the onset of the depression-adjustment process is to continue inflating money and credit. For only continual doses of new money on the credit market will keep the boom going and the new stages profitable. Furthermore, only ever increasing doses can step up the boom, can lower interest rates further, and expand the production structure, for as the prices rise, more and more money will be needed to perform the same amount of work. Once the credit expansion stops, the market ratios are reestablished, and the seemingly glorious new investments turn out to be malinvestments, built on a foundation of sand.

How long booms can be kept up, what limits there are to booms in different circumstances, will be discussed below. But it is clear that prolonging the boom by ever larger doses of credit expansion will have only one result: to make the inevitably ensuing depression longer and more grueling. The larger the scope of malinvestment and error in the boom, the greater and longer the task of readjustment in the depression. The way to prevent a depression, then, is simple: avoid starting a boom. And to avoid starting a boom all that is necessary is to pursue a truly free-market policy in money, i.e., a policy of 100-percent specie reserves for banks and governments.

Credit expansion always generates the business cycle process, even when other tendencies cloak its workings. Thus, many people believe that all is well if prices do not rise or if the actually recorded interest rate does not fall. But prices may well not rise because of some counteracting force—such as an increase in the supply of goods or a rise in the demand for money. But this does not mean that the boom-depression cycle fails to occur. The essential processes of the boom—distorted interest rates, malinvestments, bankruptcies, etc.—continue unchecked. This is one of the reasons why those who approach business cycles from a statistical point of view and try in that way to arrive at a theory are in hopeless error. Any historical-statistical fact is a complex resultant of many causal influences and cannot be used as a simple element with which to construct a causal theory. The point is that credit expansion raises prices beyond what they would have been in the free market and thereby creates the business cycle. Similarly, credit expansion does not necessarily lower the interest rate below the rate previously recorded; it lowers the rate below what it would have been in the free market and thus creates distortion and malinvestment. Recorded interest rates in the boom will generally rise, in fact, because of the purchasing-power component in the market interest rate. An increase in prices, as we have seen, generates a positive purchasing-power component in the natural interest rate, i.e., the rate of return earned by businessmen on the market. In the free market this would quickly be reflected in the loan rate, which, as we have seen above, is completely dependent on the natural rate. But a continual influx of circulating credit prevents the loan rate from catching up with the natural rate, and thereby generates the business-cycle process.112 A further corollary of this bank-created discrepancy between the loan rate and the natural rate is that creditors on the loan market suffer losses for the benefit of their debtors: the capitalists on the stock market or those who own their own businesses. The latter gain during the boom by the differential between the loan rate and the natural rate, while the creditors (apart from banks, which create their own money) lose to the same extent.

After the boom period is over, what is to be done with the malinvestments? The answer depends on their profitability for further use, i.e., on the degree of error that was committed. Some malinvestments will have to be abandoned, since their earnings from consumer demand will not even cover the current costs of their operation. Others, though monuments of failure, will be able to yield a profit over current costs, although it will not pay to replace them as they wear out. Temporarily working them fulfills the economic principle of always making the best of even a bad bargain.

Because of the malinvestments, however, the boom always leads to general impoverishment, i.e., reduces the standard of living below what it would have been in the absence of the boom. For the credit expansion has caused the squandering of scarce resources and scarce capital. Some resources have been completely wasted, and even those malinvestments that continue in use will satisfy consumers less than would have been the case without the credit expansion.

• 110To the extent that the new money is loaned to consumers rather than businesses, the cycle effects discussed in this section do not occur.
• 111See Mises, Human Action, p. 557.
• 112Since Knut Wicksell is one of the fathers of this business-cycle approach, it is important to stress that our usage of “natural rate” differs from his. Wicksell’s “natural rate” was akin to our “free-market rate”; our “natural rate” is the rate of return earned by businesses on the existing market without considering loan interest. It corresponds to what has been misleadingly called the “normal profit rate,” but is actually the basic rate of interest. See chapter 6 above.

In the previous section we have presented the basic process of the business cycle. This process is often accentuated by other or “secondary” developments induced by the cycle. Thus, the expanding money supply and rising prices are likely to lower the demand for money. Many people begin to anticipate higher prices and will therefore dishoard. The lowered demand for money raises prices further. Since the impetus to expansion comes first in expenditure on capital goods and later in consumption, this “secondary effect” of a lower demand for money may take hold first in producers’-goods industries. This lowers the price-and-profit differentials further and hence widens the distance that the rate of interest will fall below the free-market rate during the boom. The effect is to aggravate the need for readjustment during the depression. The adjustment would cause some fall in the prices of producers’ goods anyway, since the essence of the adjustment is to raise price differentials. The extra distortion requires a steeper fall in the prices of producers’ goods before recovery is completed.

As a matter of fact, the demand for money generally rises at the beginning of an inflation. People are accustomed to thinking of the value of the monetary unit as inviolate and of prices as remaining at some “customary” level. Hence, when prices first begin to rise, most people believe this to be a purely temporary development, with prices soon due to recede. This belief mitigates the extent of the price rise for a time. Eventually, however, people realize that credit expansion has continued and undoubtedly will continue, and their demand for money dwindles, becoming lower than the original level.

After the crisis arrives and the depression begins, various secondary developments often occur. In particular, for reasons that will be discussed further below, the crisis is often marked not only by a halt to credit expansion, but by an actual deflation—a contraction in the supply of money. The deflation causes a further decline in prices. Any increase in the demand for money will speed up adjustment to the lower prices. Furthermore, when deflation takes place first on the loan market, i.e., as credit contraction by the banks—and this is almost always the case—this will have the beneficial effect of speeding up the depression-adjustment process. For credit contraction creates higher price differentials. And the essence of the required adjustment is to return to higher price differentials, i.e., a higher “natural” rate of interest. Furthermore, deflation will hasten adjustment in yet another way: for the accounting error of inflation is here reversed, and businessmen will think their losses are more, and profits less, than they really are. Hence, they will save more than they would have with correct accounting, and the increased saving will speed adjustment by supplying some of the needed deficiency of savings.

It may well be true that the deflationary process will overshoot the free-market equilibrium point and raise price differentials and the interest rate above it. But if so, no harm will be done, since a credit contraction can create no malinvestments and therefore does not generate another boom-bust cycle.113 And the market will correct the error rapidly. When there is such excessive contraction, and consumption is too high in relation to savings, the money income of businessmen is reduced, and their spending on factors declines—especially in the higher orders. Owners of original factors, receiving lower incomes, will spend less on consumption, price differentials and the interest rate will again be lowered, and the free-market consumption/ investment ratios will be speedily restored.

Just as inflation is generally popular for its narcotic effect, deflation is always highly unpopular for the opposite reason. The contraction of money is visible; the benefits to those whose buying prices fall first and who lose money last remain hidden. And the illusory accounting losses of deflation make businesses believe that their losses are greater, or profits smaller, than they actually are, and this will aggravate business pessimism.

It is true that deflation takes from one group and gives to another, as does inflation. Yet not only does credit contraction speed recovery and counteract the distortions of the boom, but it also, in a broad sense, takes away from the original coercive gainers and benefits the original coerced losers. While this will certainly not be true in every case, in the broad sense much the same groups will benefit and lose, but in reverse order from that of the redistributive effects of credit expansion. Fixed-income groups, widows and orphans, will gain, and businesses and owners of original factors previously reaping gains from inflation will lose. The longer the inflation has continued, of course, the less the same individuals will be compensated.114

Some may object that deflation “causes” unemployment. However, as we have seen above, deflation can lead to continuing unemployment only if the government or the unions keep wage rates above the discounted marginal value products of labor. If wage rates are allowed to fall freely, no continuing unemployment will occur.

Finally, deflationary credit contraction is, necessarily, severely limited. Whereas credit can expand (barring various economic limits to be discussed below) virtually to infinity, circulating credit can contract only as far down as the total amount of specie in circulation. In short, its maximum possible limit is the eradication of all previous credit expansion.

The business-cycle analysis set forth here has essentially been that of the “Austrian” School, originated and developed by Ludwig von Mises and some of his students.115 A prominent criticism of this theory is that it “assumes the existence of full employment” or that its analysis holds only after “full employment” has been attained. Before that point, say the critics, credit expansion will beneficently put these factors to work and not generate further malinvestments or cycles. But, in the first place, inflation will put no unemployed factors to work unless their owners, though holding out for a money price higher than their marginal value product, are blindly content to accept the necessarily lower real price when it is camouflaged as a rise in the “cost of living.” And credit expansion generates further cycles whether or not there are unemployed factors. It creates more distortions and malinvestments, delays indefinitely the process of recovery from the previous boom, and makes necessary an eventually far more grueling recovery to adjust to the new malinvestments as well as to the old. If idle capital goods are now set to work, this “idle capacity” is the hangover effect of previous wasteful malinvestments, and hence is really sub-marginal and not worth bringing into production. Putting the capital to work again will only redouble the distortions.116

• 113If some readers are tempted to ask why credit contraction will not lead to the opposite type of malinvestment to that of the boom—overinvestment in lower-order capital goods and underinvestment in higher-order goods—the answer is that there is no arbitrary choice open of investing in higher-order or lower-order goods. Increased investment must be made in the higher-order goods—in lengthening the structure of production. A decreased amount of investment simply cuts down on higher-order investment. There will thus be no excess of investment in the lower orders, but simply a shorter structure than would otherwise be the case. Contraction, unlike expansion, does not create positive malinvestments.
• 114If the economy is on a gold or silver standard, then many advocates of a free market will argue for credit contraction for the following additional reasons: (a) to preserve the principle of paying one’s contractual obligations and (b) to punish the banks for their expansion and force them back toward a 100-percent-specie reserve policy.
• 115Mises first presented the “Austrian theory” in a notable section of his Theory of Money and Credit, pp. 346–66. For a more developed statement, see his Human Action, pp. 547–83. For F.A. Hayek’s important contributions, see especially his Prices and Production, and also his Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933), and Profits, Interest, and Investment. Other works in the Misesian tradition include Robbins, The Great Depression, and Fritz Machlup, The Stock Market, Credit, and Capital Formation (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1940).
• 116See Mises, Human Action, pp. 577–78; and Hayek, Prices and Production, pp. 96–99.

Having investigated the consequences of credit expansion, we must discuss the important question: If fractional-reserve banking is legal, are there any natural limits to credit expansion by the banks? The one basic limit, of course, is the necessity of the banks to redeem their money-substitutes on demand. Under a gold or silver standard, they must redeem in specie; under a government fiat paper standard (see below), the banks have to redeem in government paper. In any case, they must redeem in standard money or its virtual equivalent. Therefore, every fractional reserve bank depends for its very existence on persuading the public—specifically its clients—that all is well and that it will be able to redeem its notes or deposits whenever the clients demand. Since this is palpably not the case, the continuance of confidence in the banks is something of a psychological marvel.117 It is certain, at any rate, that a wider knowledge of praxeology among the public would greatly weaken confidence in the banking system. For the banks are in an inherently weak position. Let just a few of their clients lose confidence and begin to call on the banks for redemption, and this will precipitate a scramble by other clients to make sure that they get their money while the banks’ doors are still open. The obvious—and justifiable—panic of the banks should any sort of “run” develop encourages other clients to do the same and aggravates the run still further. At any rate, runs on banks can wreak havoc, and, of course, if pursued consistently, could close every bank in the country in a few days.118

Runs, therefore, and the constant underlying threat of their occurrence, are one of the prime limits to credit expansion. Runs often develop during a business cycle crisis, when debts are being defaulted and failures become manifest. Runs and the fear of runs help to precipitate deflationary credit contraction.

Runs may be an ever-present threat, but, as effective limitations, they are not generally active. When they do occur, they usually wreck the banks. The fact that a bank is in existence at all signifies that a run has not developed. A more active, everyday limitation is the relatively narrow range of a bank’s clientele. The clientele of a bank consists of those people willing to hold its deposits or notes (its money-substitutes) in lieu of money proper. It is an empirical fact, in almost all cases, that one bank does not have the patronage of all people in the market society or even of all those who prefer to use bank money rather than specie. It is obvious that the more banks exist, the more restricted will be the clientele of any one bank. People decide which bank to use on many grounds; reputation for integrity, friendliness of service, price of service, and convenience of location may all play a part.

How does the narrow range of a bank’s clientele limit its potentiality for credit expansion? The newly issued money-substitutes are, of course, loaned to a bank’s clients. The client then spends the new money on goods and services. The new money begins to be diffused throughout the society. Eventually—usually very quickly—it is spent on the goods or services of people who use a different bank. Suppose that the Star Bank has expanded credit; the newly issued Star Bank’s notes or deposits find their way into the hands of Mr. Jones, who uses the City Bank. Two alternatives may occur, either of which has the same economic effect: (a) Jones accepts the Star Bank’s notes or deposits, and deposits them in the City Bank, which calls on the Star Bank for redemption; or (b) Jones refuses to accept the Star Bank’s notes and insists that the Star client—say Mr. Smith—who bought something from Jones, redeem the note himself and pay Jones in acceptable standard money.

Thus, while gold or silver is acceptable throughout the market, a bank’s money-substitutes are acceptable only to its own clientele. Clearly, a single bank’s credit expansion is limited, and this limitation is stronger (a) the narrower the range of its clientele, and (b) the greater its issue of money-substitutes in relation to that of competing banks. In illustration of the first point, let us assume that each bank has only one client. Then it is obvious that there will be very little room for credit expansion. At the opposite extreme, if one bank is used by everybody in the economy, there will be no demands for redemption resulting from its clients’ purchasing from nonclients. It is obvious that, ceteris paribus, a numerically smaller clientele is more restrictive of credit expansion.

As regards the second point, the greater the degree of relative credit expansion by any one bank, the sooner will the day of redemption—and potential bankruptcy—be at hand. Suppose that the Star Bank expands credit, while none of the competing banks do. This means that the Star Bank’s clientele have added considerably to their cash balances; as a result the marginal utility to them of each unit of money to hold declines, and they are impelled to spend a great proportion of the new money. Some of this increased spending will be on one another’s goods and services, but it is clear that the greater the credit expansion, the greater will be the tendency for their spending to “spill over” onto the goods and services of nonclients. This tendency to spill over, or “drain,” is greatly enhanced when increased spending by clients on the goods and services of other clients raises their prices. In the meanwhile, the prices of the goods sold by non-clients remain the same. As a consequence, clients are impelled to buy more from nonclients and less from one another; while nonclients buy less from clients and more from one another. The result is an “unfavorable” balance of trade from clients to nonclients.119 It is clear that this tendency of money to seek a uniform level of exchange value throughout the entire market is an example of the process by which new money (in this case, new money-substitutes) is diffused through the market. The greater the relative credit expansion by the bank, then, the greater and more rapid will be the drain and consequent pressure on an expanding bank for redemption.

The purpose of banks’ keeping any specie reserves in their vaults (assuming no legal reserve requirements) now becomes manifest. It is not to meet bank runs—since no fractional-reserve bank can be equipped to withstand a run. It is to meet the demands for redemption which will inevitably come from nonclients.

Mises has brilliantly shown that a subdivision of this process was discovered by the British Currency School and by the classical “international trade” theorists of the nineteenth century. These older economists assumed that all the banks in a certain region or country expanded credit together. The result was a rise in the prices of goods produced in that country. A further result was an “unfavorable” balance of trade, i.e., an outflow of standard specie to other countries. Since other countries did not patronize the expanding country’s banks, the consequence was a “specie drain” from the expanding country and increased pressure for redemption on its banks.

Like all parts of the overstressed and overelaborated theory of “international trade,” this analysis is simply a special subdivision of “general” economic theory. And cataloging it as “international trade” theory, as Mises has shown, underestimates its true significance.120 ,121

Thus, the more freely competitive and numerous are the banks, the less they will be able to expand fiduciary media, even if they are left free to do so. As we have noted in chapter 11, such a system is known as “free banking.”122 A major objection to this analysis of free banking has been the problem of bank “cartels.” If banks get together and agree to expand their credits simultaneously, the clientele limitation vis-à-vis competing banks will be removed, and the clientele of each bank will, in effect, increase to include all bank users. Mises points out, however, that the sounder banks with higher fractional reserves will not wish to lose the goodwill of their own clients and risk bank runs by entering into collusive agreements with weaker banks.123 This consideration, while placing limits on such agreements, does not rule them out altogether. For, after all, no fractional-reserve banks are really sound, and if the public can be led to believe that, say, an 80-percent-specie reserve is sound, it can believe the same about 60-percent- or even 10-percent-reserve banks. Indeed, the fact that the weaker banks are allowed by the public to exist at all demonstrates that the more conservative banks may not lose much good will by agreeing to expand with them.

As Mises has demonstrated, there is no question that, from the point of view of opponents of inflation and credit expansion, free banking is superior to a central banking system (see below). But, as Amasa Walker stated:

Much has been said, at different times, of the desirableness of free banking. Of the propriety and rightfulness of allowing any person who chooses to carry on banking, as freely as farming or any other branch of business, there can be no doubt. But, while banking, as at present, means the issuing of inconvertible paper, the more it is guarded and restricted the better. But when such issues are entirely forbidden, and only notes equivalent to certificates of so much coin are issued, banking may be as free as brokerage. The only thing to be secured would be that no issues should be made except upon specie in hand.124

• 117Perhaps one reason for continuing confidence in the banking system is that people generally believe that fraud is prosecuted by the government and that, therefore, any practice not so prosecuted must be sound. Governments, indeed (as we shall see below), always go out of their way to bolster the banking system.
• 118All this, of course, assumes no further government intervention in banking than permitting fractional-reserve banking. Since the advent of deposit “insurance” during the New Deal, for example, the bank-run limitation has been virtually eliminated by this act of special privilege.
• 119In the consolidated balance of payments of the clients, money income from sales to nonclients (exports) will decline, and money expenditures on the goods and services of nonclients (imports) will increase. The excess cash balances of the clients are transferred to non-clients.
• 120Older economists also distinguished an “internal drain” as well as the “external drain,” but included in the former only the drain from bank users to those who insist on standard money.
• 121See Human Action, pp. 434–35.
• 122For various views on free and central banking, see Vera C. Smith, The Rationale of Central Banking (London: P.S. King and Son, 1936).
• 123Mises, Human Action, p. 444.
• 124Amasa Walker, Science of Wealth, pp. 230–31.

Historically, governments have fostered and encouraged credit expansion to a great degree. They have done so by weakening the limitations that the market places on bank credit expansion. One way of weakening is to anesthetize the bank against the threat of bank runs. In nineteenth-century America, the government permitted banks, when they got into trouble in a business crisis, to suspend specie payment while continuing in operation. They were temporarily freed from their contractual obligation of paying their debts, while they could continue lending and even force their debtors to repay in their own bank notes. This is a powerful way to eradicate limitations on credit expansion, since the banks know that if they overreach themselves, the government will permit them blithely to avoid payment of their contractual obligations.

Under a fiat money standard, governments (or their central banks) may obligate themselves to bail out, with increased issues of standard money, any bank or any major bank in distress. In the late nineteenth century, the principle became accepted that the central bank must act as the “lender of last resort,” which will lend money freely to banks threatened with failure. Another recent American device to abolish the confidence limitation on bank credit is “deposit insurance,” whereby the government guarantees to furnish paper money to redeem the banks’ demand liabilities. These and similar devices remove the market brakes on rampant credit expansion.

A second device, now so legitimized that any country lacking it is considered hopelessly “backward,” is the central bank. The central bank, while often nominally owned by private individuals or banks, is run directly by the national government. Its purpose, not always stated explicitly, is to remove the competitive check on bank credit provided by a multiplicity of independent banks. Its aim is to make sure that all the banks in the country are co-ordinated and will therefore expand or contract together—at the will of the government. And we have seen that co-ordination of expansion greatly weakens the market’s limits.

The crucial way by which governments have established central bank control over the commercial banking system is by granting the bank a monopoly of the note issue in the country. As we have seen, money-substitutes may be issued in the form of notes or book deposits. Economically, the two forms are identical. The State has found it convenient, however, to distinguish between the two and to outlaw all note issue by private banks. Such nationalizing of the note-issue business forces the commercial banks to go to the central bank whenever their customers desire to exchange demand deposits for paper notes. To obtain notes to furnish their clients, commercial banks must buy them from the central bank. Such purchases can be made only by selling their gold coin or other standard money or by drawing on the banks’ deposit accounts with the central bank.

Since the public always wishes to hold some of its money in the form of notes and some in demand deposits, the banks must establish a continuing relationship with the central bank to be assured a supply of notes. Their most convenient procedure is to establish demand deposit accounts with the central bank, which thereby becomes the “bankers’ bank.” These demand deposits (added to the gold in their vaults) become the reserves of the banks. The central bank can also more freely create demand liabilities not backed 100 percent by gold, and these increased liabilities add to the reserves and demand deposits held by banks or else increase central bank notes outstanding. The rise in reserves of banks throughout the country will spur them to expand credit, while any decrease in these reserves will induce a general contraction in credit.

The central bank can increase the reserves of a country’s banks in three ways: (a) by simply lending them reserves; (b) by purchasing their assets, thereby adding directly to the banks’ deposit accounts with the central bank; or (c) by purchasing the I.O.U.’s of the public, which will then deposit the drafts on the central bank in the various banks that serve the public directly, thereby enabling them to use the credits on the central bank to add to their own reserves. The second process is known as discounting; the latter as open market purchase. A lapse in discounts as the loans mature will lower reserves, as will open market sales. In open market sales, the people will pay the central bank for its assets, purchased with checks drawn on their accounts at the banks; and the central bank exacts payment by reducing bank reserves on its books. In most cases, the assets purchased or sold on the open market are government I.O.U.’s.125

Thus, the banking system becomes co-ordinated under the aegis of the government. The central bank is always accorded a great deal of prestige by its creator government. Often the government makes its notes legal tender. Under the gold standard, the wide resources which it commands, added to the fact that the whole country is its clientele, usually make negligible any trouble the bank may have in redeeming its liabilities in gold. Furthermore, it is certain that no government will let its own central bank (i.e., itself) go bankrupt; the central bank will always be permitted to suspend specie payment in times of serious difficulty. It can therefore inflate and expand credit itself (through rediscounts and open market purchases) and, by adding to bank reserves, spur a multiple bank credit expansion throughout the country. The effect is multiple because banks will generally keep a certain proportion of reserves to liabilities—based on estimates of nonclient redemption—and a general increase in their reserves will induce a multiple expansion of fiduciary media. In fact, the multiple will even increase, for the knowledge that all the banks are co-ordinated and expanding together decreases the possibility of nonclient redemption and therefore the proportion of reserves that each bank will wish to keep.

When the government “goes off” the gold standard, central bank notes then become legal tender and virtually the standard money. It then cannot possibly fail, and this, of course, practically eliminates limitations on its credit expansion. In the present-day United States, for example, the current basically fiat standard (also known as a “restricted international gold bullion standard”) virtually eliminates pressure for redemption, while the central bank’s ready provision of reserves as well as deposit insurance eliminates the threat of bank failure.126 In order to insure centralized control by the government over bank credit, the United States enforces on banks a certain minimum ratio of reserves (almost wholly deposits with the central bank) to deposits.

So long as a country is in any sense “on the gold standard,” the central bank and the banking system must worry about an external drain of specie should the inflation become too great. Under an unrestricted gold standard, it must also worry about an internal drain resulting from the demands of those who do not use the banks. A shift in public taste from deposits to notes will embarrass the commercial banks, though not the central bank. Assiduous propaganda on the conveniences of banking, however, has reduced the ranks of those not using banks to a few malcontents. As a result, the only limitation on credit expansion is now external. Governments, of course, are always anxious to remove all checks on their powers of inducing monetary expansion. One way of removing the external threat is to foster international cooperation, so that all governments and central banks expand their money supply at a uniform rate. The “ideal” condition for unlimited inflation is, of course, a world fiat paper money, issued by a world central bank or other governmental authority. Pure fiat money on a national scale would serve almost as well, but there would then be the embarrassment of national moneys depreciating in terms of other moneys, and imports becoming much more expensive.127

• 125There is a fourth way by which a central bank may increase bank reserves: in countries, such as the United States, where banks must keep a legally required minimum ratio of reserves to deposits, the bank may simply lower the required ratio.
• 126Foreign central banks and governments are still permitted to redeem in gold bullion, but this is hardly a consolation for either foreign citizens or Americans. The result is that gold is still an ultimate “balancing” item between national governments, and therefore a kind of medium of exchange for governments and central banks in international transactions.
• 127The transition from gold to fiat money will be greatly smoothed if the State has previously abandoned ounces, grams, grains, and other units of weight in naming its monetary units and substituted unique names, such as dollar, mark, franc, etc. It will then be far easier to eliminate the public’s association of monetary units with weight and to teach the public to value the names themselves. Furthermore, if each national government sponsors its own unique name, it will be far easier for each State to control its own fiat issue absolutely.

With the establishment of fiat money by a State or by a World State, it would seem that all limitations on credit expansion, or on any inflation, are eliminated. The central bank can issue limitless amounts of nominal units of paper, unchecked by any necessity of digging a commodity out of the ground. They may be supplied to banks to bolster their credit at the pleasure of the government. No problems of internal or external drain exist. And if there existed a World State, or a co-operating cartel of States, with a world bank and world paper money, and gold and silver money were outlawed, could not the World State then expand the money supply at will with no foreign exchange or foreign trade difficulties, permanently redistributing wealth from the market’s choice to its own favorites, from voluntary producers to the ruling castes?

Many economists and most other people assume that the State could accomplish this goal. Actually, it could not, for there is an ultimate limit on inflation, a very wide one, to be sure, but a terrible limit that will in the end conquer any inflation. Paradoxically, this is the phenomenon of runaway inflation, or hyperinflation.

When the government and the banking system begin inflating, the public will usually aid them unwittingly in this task. The public, not cognizant of the true nature of the process, believes that the rise in prices is transient and that prices will soon return to “normal.” As we have noted above, people will therefore hoard more money, i.e., keep a greater proportion of their income in the form of cash balances. The social demand for money, in short, increases. As a result, prices tend to increase less than proportionately to the increase in the quantity of money. The government obtains more real resources from the public than it had expected, since the public’s demand for these resources has declined.

Eventually, the public begins to realize what is taking place. It seems that the government is attempting to use inflation as a permanent form of taxation. But the public has a weapon to combat this depredation. Once people realize that the government will continue to inflate, and therefore that prices will continue to rise, they will step up their purchases of goods. For they will realize that they are gaining by buying now, instead of waiting until a future date when the value of the monetary unit will be lower and prices higher. In other words, the social demand for money falls, and prices now begin to rise more rapidly than the increase in the supply of money. When this happens, the confiscation by the government, or the “taxation” effect of inflation, will be lower than the government had expected, for the increased money will be reduced in purchasing power by the greater rise in prices. This stage of the inflation is the beginning of hyperinflation, of the runaway boom.128

The lower demand for money allows fewer resources to be extracted by the government, but the government can still obtain resources so long as the market continues to use the money. The accelerated price rise will, in fact, lead to complaints of a “scarcity of money” and stimulate the government to greater efforts of inflation, thereby causing even more accelerated price increases. This process will not continue long, however. As the rise in prices continues, the public begins a “flight from money,” getting rid of money as soon as possible in order to invest in real goods—almost any real goods—as a store of value for the future. This mad scramble away from money, lowering the demand for money to hold practically to zero, causes prices to rise upward in astronomical proportions. The value of the monetary unit falls practically to zero. The devastation and havoc that the runaway boom causes among the populace is enormous. The relatively fixed-income groups are wiped out. Production declines drastically (sending up prices further), as people lose the incentive to work—since they must spend much of their time getting rid of money. The main desideratum becomes getting hold of real goods, whatever they may be, and spending money as soon as received. When this runaway stage is reached, the economy in effect breaks down, the market is virtually ended, and society reverts to a state of virtual barter and complete impoverishment.129 Commodities are then slowly built up as media of exchange. The public has rid itself of the inflation burden by its ultimate weapon: lowering the demand for money to such an extent that the government’s money has become worthless. When all other limits and forms of persuasion fail, this is the only way—through chaos and economic breakdown—for the people to force a return to the “hard” commodity money of the free market.

The most famous runaway inflation was the German experience of 1923. It is particularly instructive because it took place in one of the world’s most advanced industrial countries.130 The chaotic events of the German hyperinflation and other accelerated booms, however, are only a pale shadow of what would happen under a World State inflation. For Germany was able to recover and return to a full monetary market economy quickly, since it could institute a new currency based on exchanges with other pre-existing moneys (gold or foreign paper). As we have seen, however, Mises’ regression theorem shows that no money can be established on the market except as it can be exchanged for a previously existing money (which in turn must have ultimately related back to a commodity in barter). If a World State outlaws gold and silver and establishes a unitary fiat money, which it proceeds to inflate until a runaway boom destroys it, there will be no pre-existing money on the market. The task of reconstruction will then be enormously more difficult.

• 128Cf. the analysis by John Maynard Keynes in his A Tract on Monetary Reform (London: Macmillan & Co., 1923), chap. ii, section 1.
• 129On runaway inflation, see Mises, Theory of Money and Credit, pp. 227–31.
• 130Costantino Bresciani-Turroni, The Economics of Inflation (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1937), is a brilliant and definitive work on the German inflation.

Inflation, in recent years, has been generally defined as an increase in prices. This is a highly unsatisfactory definition. Prices are highly complex phenomena, activated by many different causal factors. They may increase or decrease from the goods side—i.e., as a result of a change in the supply of goods on the market. They may increase or decrease because of a change in the social demand for money to hold; or they may rise or fall from a change in the supply of money. To lump all of these causes together is misleading, for it glosses over the separate influences, the isolation of which is the goal of science. Thus, the money supply may be increasing, while at the same time the social demand for money is increasing from the goods side, in the form of increased supplies of goods. Each may offset the other, with no general price changes occurring. Yet both processes perform their work nevertheless. Resources will still shift as a result of inflation, and the business cycle caused by credit expansion will still appear. It is, therefore, highly inexpedient to define inflation as a rise in prices.

Movements in the supply-of-goods and in the demand-for-money schedules are all the results of voluntary changes of preferences on the market. The same is true for increases in the supply of gold or silver. But increases in fiduciary or fiat media are acts of fraudulent intervention in the market, distorting voluntary preferences and the voluntarily determined pattern of income and wealth. Therefore, the most expedient definition of “inflation” is one we have set forth above: an increase in the supply of money beyond any increase in specie.131

The absurdity of the various governmental programs for “fighting inflation” now becomes evident. Most people believe that government officials must constantly pace the ramparts, armed with a huge variety of “control” programs designed to combat the inflation enemy. Yet all that is really necessary is that the government and the banks (nowadays controlled almost completely by the government) cease inflating.132 The absurdity of the term “inflationary pressure” also becomes clear. Either the government and banks are inflating or they are not; there is no such thing as “inflationary pressure.”133

The idea that the government has the duty to tax the public in order to “sop up excess purchasing power” is particularly ludicrous.134 If inflation has been under way, this “excess purchasing power” is precisely the result of previous governmental inflation. In short, the government is supposed to burden the public twice: once in appropriating the resources of society by inflating the money supply, and again, by taxing back the new money from the public. Rather than “checking inflationary pressure,” then, a tax surplus in a boom will simply place an additional burden upon the public. If the taxes are used for further government spending, or for repaying debts to the public, then there is not even a deflationary effect. If the taxes are used to redeem government debt held by the banks, the deflationary effect will not be a credit contraction and therefore will not correct maladjustments brought about by the previous inflation. It will, indeed, create further dislocations and distortions of its own.

Keynesian and neo-Keynesian “compensatory fiscal policy” advocates that government deflate during an “inflationary” period and inflate (incur deficits, financed by borrowing from the banks) to combat a depression. It is clear that government inflation can relieve unemployment and unsold stocks only if the process dupes the owners into accepting lower real prices or wages. This “money illusion” relies on the owners’ being too ignorant to realize when their real incomes have declined—a slender basis on which to ground a cure. Furthermore, the inflation will benefit part of the public at the expense of the rest, and any credit expansion will only set a further “boom-bust” cycle into motion. The Keynesians depict the free market’s monetary-fiscal system as minus a steering wheel, so that the economy, though readily adjustable in other ways, is constantly walking a precarious tightrope between depression and unemployment on the one side and inflation on the other. It is then necessary for the government, in its wisdom, to step in and steer the economy on an even course. After our completed analysis of money and business cycles, however, it should be evident that the true picture is just about the reverse. The free market, unhampered, would not be in danger of suffering inflation, deflation, depression, or unemployment. But the intervention of government creates the tightrope for the economy and is constantly, if sometimes unwittingly, pushing the economy into these pitfalls.

• 131Inflation is here defined as any increase in the money supply greater than an increase in specie, not as a big change in that supply. As here defined, therefore, the terms “inflation” and “deflation” are praxeological categories. See Mises, Human Action, pp. 419–20. But also see Mises’ remarks in Aaron Director, ed., Defense, Controls, and Inflation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 3 n.
• 132See George Ferdinand, “Review of Albert G. Hart, Defense without Inflation,” Christian Economics, Vol. III, No. 19 (October 23, 1951).
• 133See Mises in Director, Defense, Controls, and Inflation, p. 334.
• 134See Mises in Director, Defense, Controls, and Inflation, p. 334.