Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on May 2, 2018
… is from pages 139-140 of the 1990 Transaction Publishers reprint of W.H. Hutt‘s important 1936 book, Economists and the Public (footnotes deleted; links added):
In emphasizing the desirability of cheapening prices and lowering costs of production, the economists preached an unpopular gospel; and this made them vulnerable to that type of misrepresentation which could suggest that their ideal was the forcing of wages down to subsistence level. But, as Professor [Moritz] Bonn has pointed out, ‘the main object they had in view was a diminution of human labour for the purpose of supplying men with increasing quantities and increasing varieties of goods’. The truth is that their sympathies, as Professor [Edwin] Cannan has emphasized in the case of Adam Smith, ‘seem to have been wholly with the industrious wage-earner, and especially with the poorest’.
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