The basic facts of economics : $b A common-sense primer for advanced students — John Shaqi
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
To be a closer synonym for Economics, Business must deserve a
definition relating its customs to natural Economic law (a subject
to be considered in a later Lesson) and extending its functions more
completely to universal mutual service. Moreover, its definition
must widen the Business concept so as to include all kinds of such
service. Business can no more exclude from its realm particular
Business specialties, though that be customary, than it can include the
operations of “confidence men,” as it is sometimes supposed to do. Its
functions are not limited to commerce, nor to banking, nor to any other
of those Business specialties to which careless speech, and sometimes
snobbish thought, tend to narrow the meaning of the word.
Business is that function of social life which includes all serviceable
specialties. Such terms as “commercial,” “mercantile,” “industrial,”
“agriculture,” “labor,” “the professions,” and so on, denominate
specializations or sections or subsidiary departments of Business, not
Business as a whole. They are useful for subclassification; but, like
all subclassifications, whether in Economics or in any other science,
they are misleading when perverted into general terms for primary
or fundamental or comprehensive categories. The term Business, like
the term Economics, should include them all. Every kind of service
necessitates busy-ness; and serviceable busy-ness, what is that but
Business?
Considered comprehensively, then, and excluding parasitical adhesions,
Business might be, as some advanced students of Economic phenomena
suppose it to be, another name for Economics. In the scholastic sense,
Economics is the more orthodox term; in the practical sense Business
could better express the idea. Both terms might have practically the
same meaning if considerately used. Honest Business, inclusive of all
serviceable activities--service for service, to adopt a phrase in
definition of Business--would be identical with Economics. Either, like
the other, may be described superficially as the process of the science
of making money.
Quite consistently with the foregoing survey, Economics has been
described as the science of “mankind making a living.” This definition,
too, excludes the solitary life by limiting Economic science to
cooperative mankind--in other words, to Economic association. It,
too, identifies Economics and legitimate Business; for only through
legitimate Business activities can cooperative mankind make a living.
It, too, excludes theft in all its forms and guises; for so much of
a living as some may make by any kind of theft, others must lose as
victims of theft. It, too, brings Economics on the surface and Business
on the surface within the definition of “the science of making money;”
for only by means of money measurements in money terms does or can
mankind in the mass make its living.
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