quote:

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The balance between consumption and production makes price. The market settles, and alone can settle, that price. Market is the meeting and conference of the consumer and producer when they mutually discover each other's wants. Nobody, I believe, has observed with any reflection what market is, without being astonished at the truth, the correctness, the celerity, the general equity, with which the balance of wants is settled. They who wish the destruction of that balance, and would fain by arbitrary regulation decree, that defective production should not be compensated by encreased price, directly lay their axe to the root of production itself....

I beseech the Government...seriously to consider that years of scarcity or plenty, do not come alternately or at short intervals, but in pretty long cycles and irregularly, and consequently that we cannot assure ourselves, if we take a wrong measure, from the temporary necessities of one season; but that the next, and probably more, will drive us to the continuance of it, so that in my opinion, there is no way of preventing this evil which goes to the destruction of all our agriculture, and of that part of our internal commerce which touches our agriculture the most nearly, as well as the safety and very being of Government, but manfully to resist the very first idea, speculative or practical, that it is within the competence of Government, taken as Government, or even of the rich, as rich, to supply to the poor, those necessaries which it has pleased the Divine Providence for a while to with-hold from them. We the people, ought to be made sensible, that it is not in breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of softening the divine displeasure to remove any calamity under which we suffer, or which hangs over us.

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Written at a time of famine in England.

[ June 02, 2002: Message edited by: rasmus_raven ]

quote:

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We the people, ought to be made sensible, that it is not in breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of softening the divine displeasure to remove any calamity under which we suffer, or which hangs over us.

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"... the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God."

Present-day "conservatives" who look to Burke as a forefather, if they're aware of this pamphlet, must gloss over it in embarrassed silence.

Burke is not a libertarian, though he believes in the free market; nonetheless, I'd like to add that one the most powerful arguments against market liberalism, one which Amartya Sen makes in his study of the Bengal famine of the 1940's, is that a libertarian regime of property rights is perfectly consistent with unnecessary famines in which millions of people die. The Bengal famine did not arise from an overall scarcity of food; it arose out of the ordinary functioning of the market. Millions died. Like Burke, the libertarian would argue that there is no case for state intervention. I can find more details of Sen's argument, the historical circumstances etc. and post them later.

[ June 05, 2002: Message edited by: rasmus_raven ]

Unfortunately, this reasonably good summary article about Sen does not go into detail on the 1943 famine, though much the same point is made about the 1974 famine.

Most of the article is more philosophical, and fairly interesting, but here is the relevant section of it:

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The young Amartya Sen also lived through the terrible Bengal famine of 1943, and that experience helped inspire Poverty and Famines (1981), which started to win him attention beyond the economics profession. His analysis of famines, summarized in an excellent chapter in Development as Freedom, is counterintuitive. The cause of widespread starvation seems obvious: A drought in Africa, or a tidal wave or flooding in South Asia, dramatically reduces the supply of food. But Sen found that once he looked closely at real famines, they did not follow such causal patterns.

Take the Bangladesh famine of 1974. Sen discovered that it "occurred in a year of greater food availability per head than in any other year between 1971 and 1976." What actually happened was that the floods that year hit rural landless laborers indirectly. Because they had no land, all their income came from transplanting rice for others. The floods prevented them from earning the meager amount that kept their families alive in most years. There did turn out to be enough food in Bangladesh that year, but the rural poor could not afford to buy it.

Sen points out, chillingly, that large famines can strike down thousands of human beings without anyone's formal libertarian rights being violated. No dictator stole food from the Bangladeshi poor in 1974. The normal functioning of the economy, with property rights respected, led to their deaths.

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Here is Ian Hacking's very lucid review of Sen's previous foray, Inequality Re-examined

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Amartya Sen is best known to the general reader for his powerful essays on famine. He is an optimist about some of our gravest economic problems, such as mass starvation in a world that at present can easily produce more food than everyone can eat. Reason and voluntary participation are his watchwords. He shows that some of the nostrums about which we have become complacent or cynical can actually work. Thus with a fallible democracy and a fairly free press, India has not had a famine since independence; during the same period China had one of the worst famines on earth. In Zimbabwe there was food while the Sahel region starved.

[...]

Inequality Reexamined is splendidly concise. If you skip the references, it is only 150 pages long, the distillation of a number of endowed lectures given around the world. It alludes to an enormous number of works by other economists, and explicitly cites some seven books and fifty articles of his own. Some readers find that the result is too compressed for comfort, but I think not. Sen's aim is to present a small number of abstract theses that are as important to him as his more down-to-earth reflections. While he has devoted part of his career to applied economics, here we have a profoundly theoretical essay, more philosophy than economics. Sen's model in this case is John Rawls, whose A Theory of Justice is the masterpiece of twentieth-century liberal moral theory. It considers, in general, what ought to be, and what is best; only in asides does it address how to achieve the ends it suggests.

The temper of the times seems to be leading us further and further away from many of Sen's moral positions. Where Sen is generous, successful politicians urge their communities to be ruthless. Since Sen is also an applied economist, you might expect him to propose practical strategies to combat such ungenerous economic policies, even if those strategies have little hope of being effective at present. He does not do so. His book is a philosophical analysis, indeed, a moral tract.

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[ June 07, 2002: Message edited by: rasmus_raven ]

Warning: it is an 800K file.

It's funny that Burke is so quoted today. According to the playwright Alan Bennett -- who mentions him while talking about The Madness of George III, which was filmed as The Madness of King George -- Burke was known in his day as a tediously long-winded orator. In fact, in Parliament he was known as "the Dinner Bell," "because when he rose to speak he regularly emptied the House."

[edited to remove unfortunate, if completely unintentional, pun]

[ June 07, 2002: Message edited by: 'lance ]