The basic facts of economics : $b A common-sense primer for advanced studentsPost, Louis F. (Louis Freeland)
General
The basic facts of economics : $b A common-sense primer for advanced students
Post, Louis F. (Louis Freeland)
Economics
Wage-workers by the day, the week or month, and salary-workers by the
year, also workers on commission or for percentages or for profits,
make more or less money as working opportunities are more or less
plentiful, and wages or salaries or percentage totals and profit totals
are consequently higher or lower.
Engineers, lawyers, physicians, architects, dentists, clergymen,
teachers--all professional workers,--make money to the extent of the
marketability of the services they offer.
And investors, do they not invest by money measurements and in money
terms for the purpose of obtaining Economic incomes measured by money
and expressed in terms of money?
Manifestly, the immediate object of everybody’s activity in the field
of Economics is to make money.
Does one desire food? By making money he gets food. Does one desire
clothing? He gets it by making money. Does he wish for housing,
furnishings, automobiles, railway or steamboat transportation,
necessaries of any kind, luxuries of whatever variety, household
service, professional service, legislative or judicial service,
mechanical service, mercantile service, clerical service? By making
money he gets them. Does one wish for slaves? If slavery be an
institution of his time and place, he may have slaves by purchases with
the money he makes. Should he be a slave himself, he may purchase his
freedom with money if he can get it. Does land-ownership appeal to one?
Let him make money and he can buy land. Whatever object the Economic
field may offer for the satisfaction of human desires, that object is
attainable by making money. In no other way can it be attained through
Economic processes.
If gifts be cited as exceptions let the fact be noted that giving is
not an Economic process. It lacks the element of exchange or trade. So,
too, of theft in any of its forms. In genuine Economics there must be
two gainers in every trade. There is no such science as Economics of
the Forty Thieves variety.
Even in such seeming exceptions to the Economic importance of money
as are offered by barter, in which no money passes and no money
accounting is made, comparisons of the objects thus directly exchanged
are nevertheless contemplated by the exchangers in terms of money.
The owner of a horse that might sell for two hundred dollars, would
not barter it for a horse that could sell for only one hundred--not
unless he got “boot” enough to even up the money difference to his
satisfaction. Nor would the boy with a two-dollar penknife “swap even”
for a one-dollar jackknife. It is only when the two horses or the two
knives seem to their respective owners to be approximately equal by
money measurement that an “even swap” is conceivable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
The basic facts of economics : $b A common-sense primer for advanced students — John Shaqi
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