The Value of MoneyAnderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
General
The Value of Money
Anderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
Money
It may be well to suggest rough _differentiae_ which mark off these
values from one another. Legal values are social values which will be
enforced, if need be, by the organized _physical_ force of the group,
through the government. Moral values are social values which the group
enforces by approbation and disapprobation, by cold shoulders and
ostracism or by honor and praise. Economic values are values which the
group enforces under a system of free enterprise, by means of profits
and losses, by riches or bankruptcy. The group may, under a communistic
or socialistic system, rely in whole or in part upon the machinery of
the law; in which case economic values appear not in their own form as
immediately guiding production, but as "presuppositions" of some of the
legal values.
The differentiation of these types of social value may also run in
terms of their _functions_,[31] though it is not so easy to mark them
off here, since their functions overlap. The function of economic values
is to guide and control the economic activities of men, to send labor
from one industry to another, to cause one sort of thing to be produced
or another, to supply the motive force which _impels_ industry. Legal
and moral values also directly affect industry, often working to check
the results which the economic values alone would lead to--as when the
law forbids the production and sale of liquor, or checks child labor,
etc. The law, on the other hand, does not, primarily, in its influence
on industry, seek _positively_ to determine its direction. The law
forbids the production of liquor, but does not decree the production of
bread. The law may seek to affect industry positively, by protective
tariffs, for example, which aim at the building up of certain
industries, but its effects are here indirect, reached through
modifications in the economic values. Economic values, on the other
hand, do not primarily aim at the regulation of the conduct of men
outside the market place, or the shop or the farm, etc. Economic values
are not primarily concerned with making men be good husbands or good
neighbors, or brave soldiers. Economic values may be used, in part, for
these purposes, as when a father-in-law uses his wealth as a lever to
make his son-in-law behave--or, indeed, as a bait to get a son-in-law!
It is hard to find a phase of social life which is not touched by all
types of social values, but it is possible, roughly, to mark off those
phases of social life which are subject to primary regulation by one or
the other sort of social value.
The differentiation is easier when we look at the social _institutions_
which have to do primarily with the one or the other sort of value.
Courts and legislatures are easily marked off from stock exchanges and
banking houses. There is not so clearly an institutional nucleus for
moral values, since the church has lost its control over the moral
situation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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