6.

The doctrine of interventionism

The pre scientific thinking has always represented the society
based on private ownership of the means of production as a genuine
chaos, and therefore need an order imposed from outside through
the norms of morality and law. Always it thought that society can
only exist and last if buyers and sellers comply with criteria of
justice and equity. The government must intervene to prevent any
arbitrary possible deviation from the "fair price". This conception
comes to dominate all social doctrines since the eighteenth century
and has its highest expression in all its naivete, in the writings of the
mercantilists.
The eighteenth century makes a discovery which, moreover
already announced in some very earlier writings on issues of
currency and prices- that suddenly launched an economic science
that comes to replace the collections of moral precepts and
regulations compendia public and aphoristic observations on the
effectiveness or ineffectiveness administration. It is found that prices
are not arbitrarily determined, but that sets the market situation as
accurate within margins that can speak almost univocal
determination. It also finds that entrepreneurs and owners of the
means of production, through the law of the market, are at the

service of consumers and that its activity is not arbitrary, but

depends entirely on who can adapt to certain conditions. All this
forms the basis of the science of political economy and catallactics
system. Where the earlier economists had not seen but arbitrariness
and chance, necessity and regularity relations are now perceived.
Science and the system eventually could replace the comments with
the regulations of public administration.
In classical economics, however, still lacks the clear conviction
that only private ownership of the means of production can provide
the foundation for building a society based on the division of labor
and collective ownership of the media is simply unworkable. The
influence of mercantilism led to the classical economics to contrast
productivity and profitability, and to take that path that would take
her to ask the question of whether a socialist society would not be
preferable to a capitalist society. In any case, he recognized clearly
that leaving aside the so-called trade unionism solution in which
obviously no alternative exists only thought- capitalism or socialism
and in the game's economic system based on private ownership
means of production are bound to fail all interventions that the
people demand and that the rulers are happy to implement.

The authors repeat insistently illiberal ideas of classical

economics served the "interests" of the "bourgeoisie" and that only
that were successful and helped the bourgeoisie to succeed. The
truth is that only the freedom created by liberalism has allowed the
incredible development of the productive forces that has taken place
in recent generations. But it errs who thinks that the victory of
liberalism has been facilitated by their attitude towards the
"interventionism". Against liberalism were allied interests of all
protected, secured, the favored and privileged by government
activity multiforme. If, nevertheless, he managed argued, was for its
cultural victory, which meant a checkmate to the defenders of
privilege. It was a novelty that all privileges were asked harmed by
its abolition. The novelty consisted of the success of the attack to the
same system that made possible the privileges, and that was solely
due to the cultural victory of liberalism.
Liberalism has triumphed exclusively with and through the
political economy. No other political-economic ideology can be
somehow compatible with science catallactics. In the England of the
twenties and thirties of the nineteenth century it attempted to use
political economy to show dysfunctions and injustice of the
capitalist social order. This attempt then departed Marx to build

their "scientific" socialism. However, even if these writers had to

demonstrate what reproached the capitalist economy, it should have
in any case provide further proof that a different socialist social
order -for example would be better than capitalism. And this not
only did not, but also failed to show that a social order based on
collective ownership of the means of production would be able to
function. Reject any discussion of the problems of a socialist society,
calling disparagingly of "utopian" like Marxism does not solve the
problem without.
With the means of science can not decide whether an
institution or a social order or not "fair". According to preferences,
you may be considered "fair" or "immoral" this or that; but if it is not
able to replace what is condemned for something else, it is useless
even start the discussion.
But this is not the problem that interests us here. The only
important thing for us is that it has been demonstrated that between
al- together, or social system based on private ownership of the
means of production and based on collective ownership system
(leaving aside the unionist solution) is imaginable and a third
possible form of society. That third way, based on the limited
ownership, controlled and regulated in an authoritarian manner, is

inherently contradictory and irrational. Any attempt to do it is

seriously intended to lead to a crisis whose only way out is socialism
or capitalism.
This is a conclusion of economic science that no one has to
rebut. Those who want to defend this third form of society based on
authoritarian regulation of private property have no choice but to
reject outright the very possibility of a scientific understanding of
economic reality, as it did in the past the Historical School in
Germany and as today make institutionalists in the United States. In
the place of the economy, formally abolished and prohibited science
of the state and public administration, which merely records the
provisions of the authority and propose the adoption of new ones,
along with full awareness the line of stands mercantilist and even
the canonist doctrine of just price, throwing overboard as useless
junk, all the work of political economy.
The German Historical School and its many followers, even
outside Germany, have not felt the need to address the problems
catallactics. They had more than enough to handle the arguments
used by Schmoller and some of his students, for example Hasbach,
in a famous controversy about the method. Only three authors fully
understand the problem of the principle of social reform in the

decade that goes from the Prussian constitutional conflict and the
Weimar Constitution: Philippovich, Stolzmann and Max Weber. But
of these three only Philippovich had knowledge of the nature and
object of theoretical political economy; on your system, however,
catallactics and interventionism are juxtaposed without mediation,
without a bridge that allows moving from one to the other, and
without even attempting to resolve the underlying problem.
Stolzmann, meanwhile, tried to transform into organic principles
and insufficient few indications of Schmoller and Brentano. It was
inevitable that his company failed; only it is regrettable that the only
representative of the School who approached the problem really did
not have the faintest idea what representatives argued that he fought
orientation. As for Max Weber, he stood halfway because he
occupied as it was in totally different problems, was fundamentally
alien to political economy, which perhaps would have been closer if
death would not have surprised prematurely.
For several years there has been talk of a revival of interest in
political economy at German universities. It is thought, for example,
authors like Liefmann, Oppenheimer, and others Gottl hard-fighting
system of modern political economy subjectivist, who otherwise
only know their representatives 'Austrian'. This is not the

appropriate place to address the issue of the legitimacy of such

attacks. We are interested rather talk about the effects that end up
having on the analysis of the possibility of based on the regulation
of private property through state intervention system. Each of these
three authors liquid as completely wrong all the work of theoretical
political economy of past- Physiocrats, Classical School, modern
economists in particular, and especially that of the "Austrians" who
denounce it as incredible example aberration of the human mind,
and which opposed a system of political economy that has the
presumption to be absolutely original and definitely solve all
problems. All this obviously occurs in the public the impression that
this science is the realm of uncertainty, in which everything is
problematic, and that political economy is nothing but the personal
opinion of the theoretical. The confusion created by the works of
these authors in the German-speaking area has forgotten that there
is a theory of political economy and its system if we except some
differences on certain aspects which often boil down to differences
enjoys terminolgicas- unanimous consideration of all lovers of
science, and in the background, at least in the basic questions, also
the consensus of those authors, despite their criticisms and
reservations. Obviously, as this crucial aspect has been overlooked,

these critics have not grasped the need to consider interventionism

in the perspective of economic theory.
All this has added the effect of the controversy over value
judgments in science. In the hands of the Historical School, political
science as an academic discipline he became a kind of technique for
leaders and politicians. In university classrooms and textbooks they
defended themselves, and rose to the rank of "science" simple
political and economic demands. "Science" condemned capitalism as
immoral and unjust, rejects the proposal for socialism for being "too
radical" solution, and recommends state socialism or the system of
regulation of private property by authoritarian interventions.
Political economy is no longer something that has to do with
knowledge and power, but just with our good intentions. Finally,
based on all of the second decade of our century, it has begun to
notice this collusion between politics and university teaching. The
public began to distrust the official representatives of science,
convinced that its main function is to provide the support of the
"science" programs of political parties friends. It was no longer
possible to tolerate the scandal that each political party is believed
standing to appeal the judgment of the "science" considered more
favorable than it really was nothing that the judgment of the

professors framed in the party itself. We had to react. And so, when
Max Weber and some of his friends invoked the need for "science"
refrain from making value judgments and that the chairs stop being
instrumentalized abused for propaganda of certain political and
economic ideologies, consensus it was almost unanimous.
Among those who agreed with Max Weber, or at least not
dared oppose him, some intellectuals were whose past was the very
negation of the principle of objectivity and whose writings were but
a paraphrase of certain programs of economic policy. His
interpretation of this "freedom from value judgments" was very
particular. Ludwig Pohle and Adolf Weber were faced with the
fundamental problem of interventionism investigating the effects of
union activity on wage policy. Followers of political union, led by
Brentano Luxury and Sidney Webb and Betrice were not able to
oppose any serious argument to its conclusions. But the new
postulate of "free science" seemed to free them from the difficulties
they encountered. They could go merrily above everything that did
not fit into their schemes, under the pretext that it was incompatible
with the dignity of science mixed in partisan diatribes. And so the
principle of Wertfreiheit, in perfect good faith had defended Max
Weber to relaunch the scientific elaboration of the problems of social

life, it was used to put the Sozialpolitik school historical-realistic

Covered criticism of theoretical political economy.
What it is ignored systematically perhaps not without
pointedly is the distinction between the theoretical analysis of the
problems of political economy and the formulation of the principles
of economic policy. When, for example when analyzing the effects of
administered prices, we say that, ceteris paribus, setting a maximum
price below the price that would be formed spontaneously in the
free market, causes a reduction in supply, and therefore conclude
that the price control target misses the point that the authority was
intended to achieve by this means, and therefore that control is
illogical because it generates a policy of price increases, this does not
mean making a value judgment. Neither the physiologist makes a
value judgment when he says that supplying cyanide is lethal for
human life and therefore a "food system" based on cyanide would be
illogical. Physiology does not respond to questions concerning the
will or the purpose of feeding or kill; It simply states what things are
and what nutritional effects, however, have lethal effects, and
therefore what they should do, respectively, dieticians and
murderers, according to their particular logic. If I say that price
control is illogical, I mean simply not getting the target normally

sought through that medium. A Bolshevik who claimed that want to

apply price controls because its sole purpose is to prevent
functioning market mechanisms and thus transform human society
into chaos "devoid of all logic" in order to more quickly realize their
communist ideal, nothing he might object from the point of view of
the theory of price control, as nothing could be argued from the
point of view of physiology who wanted to commit suicide with
cyanide. When similarly irrationality of trade unionism and the
impracticability of socialism is denounced, this has absolutely
nothing to do with value judgments.
Rate inadmissible all these analysis means depriving the basis
for the political economy. We see how very capable young people
who in other circumstances would have occupied fruitfully
economic problems, waste time in jobs that do not deserve their
talent, and are thus of little use to science, precisely because victims
of the mistakes that just denounce ceases to be most scientific tasks
shaft.