Economist in the Grand Tradition

Economics of the Free Society, by Wilhelm Roepke. Regnery, $4.95 Economists who have operated in the grand tradition—Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall, of course; and today, Robbins, Mises, Hayek, Knight— have not hesitated to speak out loud and clear about the greediness of private men and the stupidity of public policy-makers. Economics once was called political economy and was properly a division of statecraft: it was austere, detached; it commanded attention and respect. Except for a handful of persons today—and they live in outer darkness, rarely studied in the schools and, when mentioned at all, contemptuously disposed of in footnotes—its practitioners are lighthearted and irresponsible, making up all kinds of dangerous brews which, too frequently, the heads of states are willing to prescribe. In consequence, we get sicker and sicker as we swallow these drafts—of deficit financing, inflation, industrywide bargaining, subsidies and stockpiling.

Wilhelm Roepke, too, along with the few I have mentioned, has resisted the blandishments of “the new economics”; and he has paid the usual price—voluntary flight from his own country, unknown in the English-speaking world, a small, still voice. Not quite: in Germany, after all these years of exile, for the time being he is an honored man.

LH

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Louis M. Hacker

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Economics of the Free Society, by Wilhelm Roepke. Regnery, $4.95 Economists who have operated in the grand tradition—Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall, of course; and today, Robbins, Mises, Hayek, Knight— have not hesitated to speak out loud and clear about the greediness of private men and the stupidity of public policy-makers. Economics once was called political economy and was properly a division of statecraft: it was austere, detached; it commanded attention and respect. Except for a handful of persons today—and they live in outer darkness, rarely studied in the schools and, when mentioned at all, contemptuously disposed of in footnotes—its practitioners are lighthearted and irresponsible, making up all kinds of dangerous brews which, too frequently, the heads of states are willing to prescribe. In consequence, we get sicker and sicker as we swallow these drafts—of deficit financing, inflation, industrywide bargaining, subsidies and stockpiling.

Wilhelm Roepke, too, along with the few I have mentioned, has resisted the blandishments of “the new economics”; and he has paid the usual price—voluntary flight from his own country, unknown in the English-speaking world, a small, still voice. Not quite: in Germany, after all these years of exile, for the time being he is an honored man.