The Question of Freedom in Economics and Economic Organization

Abstract

The scarcity of resources is an ineluctable fact of history. Bare subsistence has been the lot of most people, and necessity has enthralled many slavery, serfdom, peonage, or indentured service to a small governing class seldom inclined to let its fate rest on the behavior of a freely acting population. The lash of the overseer, the sale of bondsmen to meet debts, the corvee, the appropriation of crops by headmen or tax collectors, and dismembering sanctions for disobedience are but a few of the grim variants of force that overlords have used to control and exploit their servants. If life was harsh a subsistence world, this reality was reflected the prevailing wisdom that may or may not have eased one's passage through it. The injunction to Adam, in the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread, till thou unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return is no more relentless than Arthur Young's cryptic observation that Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious.' Young, no doubt, had a livelier appreciation of the backward-bending supply curve for labor than the author of that Old Testament wisdom. Nonetheless, they both observed an impoverished world and it did not occur to either one that mankind could be relieved of its economic burden. Paradoxically, Young was a contemporary of Adam Smith, who gleaned the stirrings of competitive capitalism the Midlands and the north of England the outlines of a model that subsequently became the basis for modern views relating economic organization