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

144 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK to be “a form of investment neither more nor less lucrative than others.” On the ethics of confiscation Clark concludes that morally as well as legally “pure capital when invested in land, has the same rights that elsewhere belong to it.” And as to con- fiscating all land values by the single tax, he exclaims: “would it be robbery? No; it would be the quintessence of robbery.” Two years later at the “Single Tax debate” at Saratoga, Clark developed in a very interesting way his ideas of pure capital as seeking investment in whatever form the State has said it may take. He sees it as a policy of expediency for the public welfare in the long run. The State “has said that it [capital] may go into land. For ends of its own it has so decided; and the ends are good.” But Clark felt that he had got hold of a deeper truth, more than a mere argument on a current issue. This monograph repre- sents in most respects a completely new start toward a sys- tematic theory of distribution which has little in common with his views in The Philosophy of Wealth, excepting “effective utility” (the marginal principle). It is needless to restate the argument of this well-nigh classical essay. Though brief, it 1s rich in ideas, and any one who has not read it will be well repaid by its careful study. But read to-day, even by the most friendly critic, the argu- ment reveals certain defects, partly arising out of its original polemical impulse, and partly due to the influence of the older conceptions upon Clark’s thought. As to the latter, traces of the labor theory of value remain in the confusion between the process of evaluating “concrete instruments,” including natural land, and the “personal sacrifices incurred in the service of society” in bringing concrete instruments into existence. When “the fruit of twenty years of labor” is exchanged for a piece of unimproved land, the value in the land is declared to embody “the fruit of personal sacrifice” of the buyer." But whence came the value of the land before it was sold? Again, though including the most imperishable land among the things which embody pure capital, Clark sees the “concrete forms of capital” as constantly vanish- ing. “The bodily tissue of capital lives by destruction and replacement.” In truth, Clark had not developed a consistent L Op. cit., pp. 55, 60. LE a

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