The-Morality-of-Capitalism-PDF

no unfavorable, economic results. On the contrary, since suchmeasures would help to free the present from the “dead hand” ofthe past they would also help to adjust present incomes to presentneeds. The distribution of wealth is a datum of the market, andby changing data we can change results without interfering withthe market mechanism! It follows that only when accompaniedby a policy designed continually to redistribute existing wealth,would the market process have “socially tolerable” results.This view, as we said, is today held by many, even by some economistswho understand the superiority of the market economyover the command economy and the frustrations of interventionism,but dislike what they regard as the social consequencesof the market economy. They are prepared to accept the marketeconomy only where its operation is accompanied by such apolicy of redistribution.The present paper is devoted to a criticism of the basis ofthis view.In the first place, the whole argument rests logically on verbalconfusion arising from the ambiguous meaning of the term “datum.”In common usage as well as in most sciences, for instancein statistics, the word “datum” means something that is, at amoment of time, “given” to us as observers of the scene. In thissense it is, of course, a truism that the mode of the distributionof wealth is a datum at any given moment of time, simply in thetrivial sense that it happens to exist and no other mode does. Butin the equilibrium theories that, for better or worse, have cometo mean so much for present-day economic thought and haveso largely shaped its content, the word “datum” has acquired asecond and very different meaning: Here a datum means a necessarycondition of equilibrium, an independent variable, and “thedata” collectively mean the total sum of necessary and sufficientconditions from which, once we know them all, we withoutfurther ado can deduce equilibrium price and quantity. In thissecond sense the distribution of wealth would thus, togetherwith the other data, be a determinant though not the onlydeterminant, of the prices and quantities of the various servicesand products bought and sold.It will, however, be our main task in the paper to show that89