If there is a puzzle to Clarence Carson’s Basic Economics (American Textbook Committee, P.O. Box 8, Wadley, Alabama 36276, 390 pp., $12.00 paperback), it is that the author skips about when visualizing his audience. Much of the book is addressed to students who have barely learned in high school or freshman year in college to parrot phrases about supply and demand. But nothing remains simple for long in Carson’s expositions. The book abounds in scores in qualifying distinctions.
First, as an Austrian economist who believes that individual choices are unpredictable, Carson rejects the idea that mathematical certainty in economics is possible. Statistics tell you what happened yesterday. “All attempts to reduce the complexity of what occurs in the market and the diversity of human motives in acting in the market to some one explanation or to mathematical precision must ultimately fail . . . .” says Carson. Still, Carson believes there are economic principles. Men have natures, and natures may be studied with an eye to determining likely uniformities.
One of the uniformities of behavior is that men try to establish their own monopolies. “The most basic of all monopolies,” says Carson, “is the exclusive right of free men to dispose of their services. Indeed, it is the specific difference between freedom and slavery. It is a natural right, hence a natural monopoly, in that the individual is the only one who can direct the constructive use of his services.” Land, of course, is a monopoly of its owner. So are shares in corporations, copyrights, patents, automobiles, and currencies.
But, having established these points, Carson finds himself in semantic trouble. Most of our historic debate about monopoly has not been cast in these terms. Carson has already said that one of the definitions of monopoly is the grant by government of an exclusive privilege to carry on the traffic in some good or service. Force enters the picture here. If an individual should attempt to deliver a first-class letter, he might find himself under arrest. When government, with its monopoly of legal force, intrudes into the market, “it tends to bring habits formed in another arena with it.”
The Sherman Antitrust Act quickly became unenforceable because no one could be sure of what it meant. The Clayton Act, which supposedly exempted labor organizations from the provisions of the antitrust laws, declared that labor is not a commodity. But labor is nonetheless bought and sold in the marketplace. Congress, in its attempt to help the unions, was, so Carson writes, “caught once again in the illogic of trying to prevent what does not so clearly exist, i.e., private monopolies, and doing it by hampering competition.” The National Labor Relations Board, as the constituted clarifier, was supposed to bring order out of chaos by insisting on bargaining in good faith. Alas, the phrase “good faith” eludes easy quantification.
Land, labor, and capital are correctly accepted by Carson as the basic factors of production. They are all scarce to varying extents. It is when one turns them into “isms” that semantic troubles begin. Landism was particularly important in the Middle Ages, when feudal overlords kept their serfs from moving about. But-towns persisted, often on old Roman and Greek sites, so there were avenues of escape from serfdom. The Black Death gave laborism its big opening. But labor needed tools. Its guilds tried to monopolize tools. But fluidity had come to stay in Western economic systems. The capitalist, in his first guise as a mercantilist, had arrived with the eighteenth century.
Karl Marx is described by Carson as a “cosmic thief.” He advocated stealing both the land and all important tools from their owners, his justification being that all property is theft anyway. But the cosmic thief was deficient as a cosmic thinker, as were Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin after him. The Russian peasants thought they were going back to a peasant-owned land-ism. Bolshevik Party members, with their union adherents, thought the new day would be one of laborism. They were all fooled. What happened was that capitalism, in the form of state capitalism, took over in the developed or developing parts of the world.
It is at this point that Carson falls back on his remarkable descriptive powers. The last part of his book goes into detail to explain the various formulations of mercantilism (in which the new nation-states vied with each other to comer gold and silver) and the big breakout in Adam Smith’s Britain when mercantilism gave way to free trade. With the lowering of tariffs and the repeal of the Corn Laws, Britain became, for the nineteenth century, the workshop of the world. Carson goes to T. S. Ashton, among other historians, for his knowledge of the “workshop” period. The tremendous growth of population in Britain during the Industrial Revolution is explained by the “substitution of wheat for inferior cereals . . . the use of brick instead of timber in the walls
“There was more soap and cheap cotton underwear. The “larger towns were paved, drained and supplied with running water . . . . “Many more people were surviving birth and childhood diseases.
From England Carson moves on to America, where the British experience was repeated at a much faster tempo. Carson includes a look at Sweden, where capitalism fuels the welfare state, which “keeps the cow fat in order to increase the amount of milk it can get from it.” A general description of welfarism throughout the West, and a scathing chapter on Communism as a centrally planned economy, conclude a book whose biggest audience may want to tackle it at the end before going to its beginning.
