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… is from page 170 of the late, great UCLA economists Armen A. Alchian [2]’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics [3] (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.); this volume is an updated version of Alchian’s and Allen’s magnificent and pioneering earlier textbook, University Economics:
In any case, scarcity implies competition to resolve who gets how much of which goods. If monetary competition is suppressed, other forms of competition must occur.
DBx: Remember this inescapable reality when you next hear proposals to use government to prevent prices and wages from adjusting. Persons offering such proposals might sincerely intend to help their fellow human beings by urging that government obstruct the ability of prices or wages expressed in money to move up or down in response to prevailing willingness-to-buy confronting prevailing willingness-to-sell. But such persons are also sincerely economically ignorant. Such persons are identical in all essential respects to a newspaper editor who proposes to reduce the murder rate in the city by ordering his reporters intentionally to undercount the number of murder victims. The superficial reports in the papers would look splendid, but the underlying reality would get even uglier as people become less informed.
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William Allen (pictured above) died, at the age of 96, one year ago today.