A BOOK THAT IS NOT MILK FOR BABES.
[Liberty, November 23, 1889.]
The most important book that has been published this year comes to Liberty from the press of the J. B. Lippincott Company, of Philadelphia. It is a little volume of something over a hundred very small pages, printed from very large type. For ten years to come it probably will be read by one person where "Looking Backward" is read by a thousand, but the economic teaching which it contains will do more in the long run to settle the labor question than will ever be done by "Looking Backward," "Progress and Poverty," and "The Co-operative Commonwealth " combined. Its title is "Involuntary Idleness: An Exposition of the Cause of the Discrepancy Existing between the Supply of, and the Demand for, Labor and Its Products." The book consists of a paper read at the meeting of the American Economic Association in Philadelphia on December 29, 1888, by Hugo Bilgram, the author of that admirable little pamphlet, "The Iron Law of Wages," with which most readers of Liberty are familiar. I am strongly inclined to hail Mr. Bilgram's new work as the best treatise on money and the relation of money to labor that has been written in the English language since Colonel William B. Greene published his "Mutual Banking."
The author prefaces his essay with a very convenient and carefully prepared skeleton of his argument, which I reproduce here, since it gives a much better idea of the book than any condensation that I might attempt:
The aim of the treatise is to search for the cause of the lack of employment, which is obviously due to the observed fact that the supply of commodities and services exceeds the demand, although reason dictates that supply and demand in general should be precisely equal. The factor destroying this natural equation is looked for among the conditions that regulate the distribution of wealth,—i.e., its division into Rent, Interest, and Wages.
The arguments evolved by the discussion of the Rent question, which of late has excited much public interest, being unable to account for the apparent surfeit of all kinds of raw materials, the topic of rent is eliminated by assuming all local advantages to be equal.
At first an examination is made of the relation of capital to the productivity of labor, and that of interest on capital to the remuneration for labor, showing that high interest tends to reduce the productivity of, as well as the remuneration for, labor. Low wages being also concomitant with a scarcity of employment, it is inferred that a close relation exists between the economic cause of involuntary idleness and the law of interest,
