The Free Market

This book consists of three lectures delivered by the eminent professor of economics at Oxford, John Jewkes. Like his brilliant Ordeal by Planning, published in 1948, it is a witty and penetrating attack on the contemporary mania for socialism, planning, redistribution of income, and other forms of governmental economic controls.

Professor Jewkes begins by posing again the problem, almost completely neglected today, of how to determine, in the words of Edmund Burke, “what the State ought to take upon itself to direct by the public wisdom and what it ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individual exertion.” His enumeration of “the legitimate functions of the State” is one that many American libertarians, including this reviewer, would consider questionably broad. At “the top of the list,” for example, he places not only “defense, justice, law and order . . . taxation and currency,” but “a high and stable level of employment, town and country planning [and] the care of the needy.” Regarding these last three functions, one is tempted to ask exactly what he has in mind. It goes without saying, for example, that high and stable employment is a condition devoutly to be wished. But isittobe achieved by the State’s maintaining a sound currency and removing obstacles to free and flexible wages and prices, or by State spending and “investment” programs, State manipulation of interest rates, deliberate credit and currency expansion, and other Keynesian devices? Jewkes apparently does have in mind the latter, for he tells us that “the outstandingly successful new function of government in our time has been the maintenance of full employment”; and even that “it is proper to describe this addition to our economic knowledge, and the major policies which depend upon it, as revolutionary.” Going further in his concept of government functions, he even asks, at one point: “Why should poverty in a Western country not be got rid of by guaranteeing everybody a minimum income, through the use of a negative income tax or other device?”

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Henry Hazlitt

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This book consists of three lectures delivered by the eminent professor of economics at Oxford, John Jewkes. Like his brilliant Ordeal by Planning, published in 1948, it is a witty and penetrating attack on the contemporary mania for socialism, planning, redistribution of income, and other forms of governmental economic controls.

Professor Jewkes begins by posing again the problem, almost completely neglected today, of how to determine, in the words of Edmund Burke, “what the State ought to take upon itself to direct by the public wisdom and what it ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individual exertion.” His enumeration of “the legitimate functions of the State” is one that many American libertarians, including this reviewer, would consider questionably broad. At “the top of the list,” for example, he places not only “defense, justice, law and order . . . taxation and currency,” but “a high and stable level of employment, town and country planning [and] the care of the needy.” Regarding these last three functions, one is tempted to ask exactly what he has in mind. It goes without saying, for example, that high and stable employment is a condition devoutly to be wished. But isittobe achieved by the State’s maintaining a sound currency and removing obstacles to free and flexible wages and prices, or by State spending and “investment” programs, State manipulation of interest rates, deliberate credit and currency expansion, and other Keynesian devices? Jewkes apparently does have in mind the latter, for he tells us that “the outstandingly successful new function of government in our time has been the maintenance of full employment”; and even that “it is proper to describe this addition to our economic knowledge, and the major policies which depend upon it, as revolutionary.” Going further in his concept of government functions, he even asks, at one point: “Why should poverty in a Western country not be got rid of by guaranteeing everybody a minimum income, through the use of a negative income tax or other device?”