Economic essays

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1753623200

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136107

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Economic essays

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: viii, 368 S.; Ill., graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Clark's reformulation of the capital concept / Frank A. Fetter

Collection:: Economics Books

142 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK or ali lira menting) deductive methods with historical studies, and in favor of state activity vs. laissez-faire, without any essential change in the old conceptions of the economic factors and shares in dis- ribution. This is well illustrated by H. C. Adams, R. T. Ely, nd many others besides Clark. The more difficult question to nswer is: Why did Clark ever, and why did he alone, break through this crust of conventional ideas, and in 1888 advance the views, received as complete novelties, with which his name as ever since been linked. he important eras of human thought, we are assured by hilosophers, rarely, if ever, are initiated by entirely new ideas, ut by the rediscovery and restatement of old ones. Therein con- ists the more effective originality. It has been said, perhaps xtremely, that the first time a new thought is expressed or an invention is made, the world simply pays no attention to it. Not until it is repeated independently and rediscovered a hundred imes, and then only under peculiarly favoring conditions, does he world look up and say: yes, there is something in it, but nothing original—indeed it is very old. Until the world has cceived an idea in this way, its rediscovery for the hundredth ime is as original as its discovery the first time, and its mere estatement by one aware of its earlier origin and rejection, calls, or that very reason, for as great vigor of thought, and for faith nd conviction. pa 1. Effects of the Single Tax Agitation The probable source from which immediate stimulation came to Clark was the contemporary single tax discussion. Started in 1379 by the publication of Henry George's book on Progress and Poverty, it gained within a few years the most remarkable vogue in popular interest. It attracted at once the attention of leading sii Professor W. G. Sumner attacked it in 1881 in magazine articles.” Professor Francis A. Walker, who seems to have been stirred to indignant protest particularly by George's proposal to confiscate land values, made it the subject of a series of lectures at Harvard in 1883, published under the title of Land and its Rent. But Clark, until after the publication of his first 1 See Dr. A. N. Young, The Single Tax Movement in the United States (1916), ng Prof. R. T. Ely noticed it in his Recent American Social- ism in 1885.

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