Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/134

 production by an excessive demand for capital-goods and a defective demand for consumption-goods, would this be rightly termed “a monetary explanation”? If credit shrinks because of a discovered excess in the demand for plant and other capital goods, owing to maldistribution of income, this cannot be regarded as a monetary explanation. The second source of this mathematical trend is, I frankly admit, more disputable. It is related to a half-conscious desire, both among academic and business “economists,” to defend the current capitalist system against the new serious assaults to which it is exposed by Socialism, Communism, and Trade Unionism seeking to use political power and ethical appeals for the furtherance of “revolutionary” aims. This can best be done, this order of economist believes, by an intellectual insistence upon the isolation of economics from other “social” activities and interests, and its presentation in “laws,” “principles,” and “tendencies” that are purely objective and quantitatively presentable. This is partly a survival, partly an extension of the Iaisser-faire competitive individualism of the Ricardian economics, Its leading exponents are genuinely afraid of the incursion of “humanism” into their science, from sentimental and idealistic sources. They realize how woefully defective the reasoning of Marxist and other full-fledged Socialists can be, how selfishly narrow many of the trade union tactics are, and they recognize themselves as “defenders of the faith.”