<blockquote>'"Science" is not, as some people imagine, memorizing a list of facts (such as the names of the planets). Nor is the progress of science determined by laboratory experiments. This is because, at the edge of our knowledge, accepted laboratory experiments don't exist and, in certain fields, laboratory experiments might not even be possible. Rather, the progress of science is determined by free inquiry, open discussion, and transparency among those engaged in a discipline.
...
Unlike socialism, capitalism does not rely on fear. Capitalism relies on belief, belief in the inexhaustible creativity of free persons.'
- Clifford F. Thies,
Science or Nonscience?, December 01, 2009</blockquote>
'...the mathematical economist, by making the human terms of "input" irrelevant, may be striking most deleterious blows at individual creativity.'<blockquote>'This business of reducing economics to mathematics is part of the disease of the Western world. The modern economist tends to think in terms of "input" and "output" and "aggregates." The question of who directs and disposes the "input," and how title to the "output" is acquired or allocated, is dismissed as irrelevant to the problem of seeing that "aggregate" purchasing power, or "aggregate" investment, is kept at a "full-employment" level. The whole business of human incentives, the question of the human will, tends to disappear from the subject of economics; the individual is lost in the sea of statistics.
Paradoxically, this can have a tremendous effect on the integers that go to make up the statistical totals, for the mathematical economist, by making the human terms of "input" irrelevant, may be striking most deleterious blows at individual creativity.
It can matter much to the inventor in his shop, or the chemist in his laboratory, that he be allowed to seek support from individuals rather than faceless bureaucrats. The beguiling breakthrough that ultimately develops into a new "ladder industry," capable of lifting a nation out of depression, is never a "statistic" at its birth; the quantifying economist only catches up with it after a lot of qualitative things have happened.'
- John Chamberlain,
Röpke Stood Against the Tide</blockquote>
'He therefore has strong incentives to "invest" in the improvement of the future situation — e.g., to sacrifice some present satisfaction in the expectation of enabling someone (himself, his children, mankind, etc.) to enjoy greater satisfactions at some future time.'<blockquote>'
Oriented Toward the FutureA provocative thesis has been put forward by Professor Edward C. Banfield of Harvard in his book,
The Unheavenly City.[<a href="[
mises.org];] He divides American society into four "class cultures": upper, middle, working, and lower classes. These "subcultures," he warns, are not necessarily determined by present economic status, but by the distinctive psychological orientation of each toward providing for a more or less distant future.
At the most future oriented end of this scale, the upper-class individual expects long life, looks forward to the future of his children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren, and is concerned also for the future of such abstract entities as the community, nation, or mankind. He is confident that within rather wide limits he can, if he exerts himself to do so, shape the future to accord with his purposes. He therefore has strong incentives to "invest" in the improvement of the future situation — e.g., to sacrifice some present satisfaction in the expectation of enabling someone (himself, his children, mankind, etc.) to enjoy greater satisfactions at some future time. As contrasted with this:
"The lower class individual lives from moment to moment. If he has any awareness of a future, it is of something fixed, fated, beyond his control: things happen to him, he does not make them happen. Impulse governs his behavior, either because he cannot discipline himself to sacrifice a present for a future satisfaction or because he has no sense of the future. He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless. His bodily needs (especially for sex) and his taste for 'action' take precedence over everything else — and certainly over any work routine. He works only as he must to stay alive, and drifts from one unskilled job to another, taking no interest in the work."[<a href=http://mises.org/daily/3876#ref3">3</a>]
- Henry Hazlitt ,
Why Some People Are Poorer, December 03, 2009</blockquote>
'...so any inquiry into the mechanism of social integrations cannot bypass economic law.'<blockquote>'Economics is not politics. One is a science, concerned with the immutable and constant laws of nature that determine the production and distribution of wealth; the other is the art of ruling. One is amoral, the other is moral. Economic laws are self-operating and carry their own sanctions, as do all natural laws, while politics deals with man-made and man-manipulated conventions. As a science, economics seeks understanding of invariable principles; politics is ephemeral, its subject matter being the day-to-day relations of associated men. Economics, like chemistry, has nothing to do with politics.
The intrusion of politics into the field of economics is simply an evidence of human ignorance or arrogance, and is as fatuous as an attempt to control the rise and fall of tides. Since the beginning of political institutions, there have been attempts to fix wages, control prices, and create capital, all resulting in failure. Such undertakings must fail because the only competence of politics is in compelling men to do what they do not want to do or to refrain from doing what they are inclined to do, and the laws of economics do not come within that scope. They are impervious to coercion. Wages and prices and capital accumulations have laws of their own, laws which are beyond the purview of the policeman.
The assumption that economics is subservient to politics stems from a logical fallacy. Since the State (the machinery of politics) can and does control human behavior, and since men are always engaged in the making of a living, in which the laws of economics operate, it seems to follow that in controlling men the State can also bend these laws to its will. The reasoning is erroneous because it overlooks consequences. It is an invariable principle that men labor in order to satisfy their desires, or that the motive power of production is the prospect of consumption; in fact, a thing is not produced until it reaches the consumer. Hence, when the State intervenes in the economy, which it always does by way of confiscation, it hinders consumption and therefore production. The output of the producer is in proportion to his intake. It is not wilfulness that brings about this result; it is the working of an immutable natural law. The slave does not consciously "lay down on the job"; he is a poor producer because he is a poor consumer.
The evidence is that economics influences the character of politics, rather than the other way around. A communist State (which undertakes to disregard the laws of economics, as if they did not exist) is characterized by its preoccupation with force; it is a fear State. The aristocratic Greek city-State took its shape from the institution of slavery. In the nineteenth century, when the State, for purposes of its own, entered into partnership with the rising industrial class, we had the mercantilist or merchant State. The Welfare State is in fact an oligarchy of bureaucrats who, in return for the perquisites and prestige of office, undertake to confiscate and redistribute production according to formulae of their own imagination, with utter disregard of the principle that production must fall in the amount of the confiscation. It is interesting to note that all welfarism starts with a program of distribution—control of the market place with its price technique—and ends up with attempts to manage production; that is because, contrary to their expectations, the laws of economics are not suspended by their political interference, prices do not respond to their dicta, and in an effort to make their preconceived notions work they apply themselves to production, and there too they fail.
The imperviousness of economic law to political law is shown in this historic fact: in the long run every State collapses, frequently disappears altogether and becomes an archeological curio. Every collapse of which we have sufficient evidence was preceded by the same course of events. The State, in its insatiable lust for power, increasingly intensified its encroachments on the economy of the nation, causing a consequent decline of interest in production, until at long last the subsistence level was reached and not enough above that was produced to maintain the State in the condition to which it had been accustomed. It was not economically able to meet the strain of some immediate circumstance, like war, and succumbed. Preceding that event, the economy of Society, on which State power rests, had deteriorated, and with that deterioration came a letdown in moral and cultural values; men "did not care." That is, Society collapsed and drew the State down with it. There is no way for the State to avoid this consequence—except, of course, to abandon its interventions in the economic life of the people it controls, which its inherent avarice for power will not let it do. There is no way for politics to protect itself from politics.
...
We know now that despite the arrogance of the State the economic forces that bear upon social trends were on the job. The production of wealth, the things men live by, declined in proportion to the State's exactions and interferences; the general concern with mere existence submerged any latent interest in cultural and moral values, and the character of Society gradually changed to that of a herd. The mills of the gods grind slow but sure; within a couple of centuries the deterioration of Roman Society was followed by the disintegration of the State, so that it had neither the means nor the will to withstand the winds of historic chance. It should be noted that Society, which flourishes only under a condition of freedom, collapsed first; there was no disposition to resist the invading hordes.
The analogy suggests a prophecy and a jeremiad. But that is not within the scope of this essay, the hypothesis of which is that Society, Government, and the State are basically economic phenomena, that a profitable understanding of these institutions will be found in economics, not in politics. This is not to say that economics can explain all the facets of these institutions, any more than the study of his anatomy will reveal all the secrets of the human being; but, as there cannot be a human being without a skeleton, so any inquiry into the mechanism of social integrations cannot bypass economic law.'
- Frank Chodorov,
Economics vs. Politics</blockquote>