Question for Labor Day, 2016
“…it is often said that to regulate the hours of labour, or to introduce differential import duties, is to break economic law.” — Palgrave’s Dictionary of Political Economy, 1894
Do you agree that regulating the hours of labor is a violation of economic law?
No, the question isn’t what is economic law; the question is who gets to say what it is.
The section the question came from – Economic Law – conceded at the end circumstances are too varied and complex for “laws” to be more than vaguely pointing to general guidelines or tendencies – definitely nothing ironclad. Do I agree? No, but then I’m not a Simon-pure Laissez-faire capitalist who would do his best to keep any of his money from going to the undeserving poor. Or even the starving wretches in 1846 Ireland. But that little question did start me skipping around the 3-volume Dictionary.
I don’t know enough of the old terms to make a systematic search, but the Irish Potato Famine was the first thing to pop into my head. The authors mentioned most of the factors, but one omission stuck out like a sore thumb. There was no mention whatever of the massive food exports from Ireland during the famine. Nor the lack of any useful food aid from the Government. Since the Irish of the day were to the Brits what the Palestinians are to the Israelis today, it was “let ’em die” and good riddance.
What would they have said about the current BDS movement? “Boycott” was easy – the term was there and the emphasis was on how it was something to be prosecuted under criminal law whenever discovered. “Divestment” turned up a blank, but “Sanctions” led me to a fascinating discussion of Christian theology and Economics. Even back in 1894 the Catholic Church was making minor waves about treating workers somewhat better than dirt. Calvin got quite a lot of ink, and all of it was good. But then Calvin was one of the types “who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.”
If stuck in a Mars-bound spaceship for many, many months, a person could do worse than having some old stuff like this to read. It would surely kill a lot of time and be a bit of an education as well.
I forget the name of this fallacy, but Brecht had it right in his Galileo. To most of us “economic law” simply means the laws enacted that regulate the economy, but this definition is from another age. In traditional societies, the ruling class is chosen and rules by the will of heaven, that is, the same forces that cause an apple to fall or fire to burn give the rulers their power to order everyone else about, take their stuff, torture them and so on. Even in the late 19th century this kind of argument had a lot of power, even after Darwin and the Glorious Revolution. It has a lot of appeal, especially since it lets members of the ruling class completely off the hook and gets them all sorts or unearned privilege.
By the 1930s, Orwell tracked the justifications of British ruling class. At some point they moved from the religious “natural law” argument to the martial class argument. If nothing else, they were brave and fought well. By his era they had dropped that argument and replaced it with one arguing that the ruling class was stupid, too stupid to come up with something better. That’s when you started to get all those the complete twit comes through stories. Only Monty Python seems to have taken this seriously.
If you use economic law as it was used when that passage was written, then limiting wages and hours was against economic law since it worked against the interests of the ruling class at the time. Of course, only idiots believe that economic law as used in that passage was anything other than might makes right. Granted, our ranks of practicing economists and political class are full of idiots, some even useful.
If “economic law” is taken to mean the behavior of humans in transactions of trade, then any human group who prescribes a prohibition or limit on the behavior of any other pair or group of humans is a violation of that law. But if “economic” law is taken to mean the behavior of individual humans without restrictions by any other human, then “economic law” is simply a subset of the “law of the jungle” and so it must also be concluded that prohibitions of human slavery is also a violation of those laws.
Or perhaps we can refer to “economic law” as one prescribed by a god, but then the question becomes which god? Zeus? Ra? and who shall interpret the god’s law? Buddhists? Jews? Christians? Muslims? and then of the multiple interpretations of each god’s law, which shall be the “right” one? And until we can agree on which is the “right” interpretation of the “economic law” we cannot know whether limiting labor hours is a violation of that law.
What can be said about laws is that there two varieties: physical laws and laws created by humans. Since “economic law” describes a human one, then the following must be true:
a) A law is that which is decreed or agreed by some form of agreement reached by human consensus within a group of humans..
b) The group must be one for which there is an agent or agents who can enforce the law.
c) The limits of enforcement dictate the limits of the law’s application among various human groups.
d) Laws change over time with different decrees or different consensus among humans in a group.
Therefore an “economic law” is solely one of human’s making and thus may have several different and diverse decreed or agreed upon versions at any one point in time among different groups of humans, and even within the same group the “economic law” may change with time.
So which specific group of humans’ who decided or decreed the “economic law” is being applied and at what specific point in time?of
This is an easy one so I’ll raise my hand. Its the economy stupid. Just look at to see who has been exerting the control and power over our economy. Not rocket science. It is the oligarchs and the 1%ers who also control the government and news media. This is how and why Clinton has so many stupid voters is because they do not want you or me to see the forest for the leaves and most don’t. They want to control everything (jobs,wages, interest rates and who gets to work and come into the country) They are doing a very good job of controlling world trade, political power, money, wars who gets ahead and who does not and what people believe. Its a real sad commentary on America today.
There are no true economic laws. Not like in the sense of physic’s or biology or math. So, how can one be breaking them?
One does not break physical laws, either.
There ARE economic laws, whether we understand them or not. We cannot “break” them any more than we can break the laws of physics. Our actions have consequences, and those consequences are determined by the natural laws, whether they are physical or economic laws, and whether we understand those laws or not.