Tweet [1]
… is from Lord Acton’s 1864 review of Gustave de Molinari’s 1855 book, Course of Political Economy [2]:
There is therefore no ground for the pretence that in order to maintain equilibrium between production and demand, we must employ the foresight of an army of administrators and surveyors, whose duty it should be to prescribe what every produce should provide, and consequently how much each consumer should enjoy. Inhabitants of our metropolis see every morning an ample but not excessive provision made for its 3,000,000 inhabitants, and this without any previous direction or settled plan; the utmost order and regularity result from the natural economic law of the supply and demand finding their equilibrium spontaneously; whereas we might look for a chaos tenfold more chaotic than that of Balaclava, if the problem were left to the arrangement of administrators or directors of social labour and consumption.
Comments