Introduction

Economics deals with wealth as a value in life. Political economics, as discussed in our times, whatever it might really be in itself, is confined to subjects that would tend to make a chancellor of the exchequer act more intelligently than he might have done had he not studied them. The subject of economics has been laughed at by most serious thinkers and dubbed a ‘dismal science’. It is based on a chronic desire in man to become richer and richer. In this sense, economics is not a science at all, but reflects the diseased condition of an individual who thinks of the wealth of nations, or of one nation, from the ego-centric standpoint of self aggrandizement.

The conflict involved in economics is paradoxical: one is to love one’s neighbor as oneself, but at the same time, Britannia must rule the waves. Between such rival positions, economics textbooks range in endless variety, wherein so-called wise people indulge themselves in notions such as those of supply and demand, production and distribution, or communication, transport, and exchange. The token value of a coin should not be mixed up with its precious metallic content, and an unintelligent change in the proportion of silver added to minted coins in a state can make all the coins disappear from the country in the twinkling of an eye. Such are some of the dangers that economics textbooks warn the chancellor of the exchequer about. The spiralling of prices, increase of rent-value, pressures of population, the efficacy of tariff walls – unjust and immoral in themselves, in which crag barons rob bag barons, as Ruskin would put it – give us an endless variety of textbook subjects as taught in colleges and universities of the present-day all over the world. One hears of possible explosion of population, and control of displaced persons to keep them from seeking livelihoods beyond national frontiers. Liberty is flaunted at every step of what passes for good economics.