Professional [Economic] Ignorance

Robert S. Doubleday

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, January-February 1936]

How much economic ignorance is essential to make a college professor eligible to the brain trust? It seems that inability to answer correctly the following questions would be ample.

1. What is labor?
   
2. Why do men want to labor?
   
3. What is essential to their doing so?
   
4. What prevents men able and willing to work from using these essentials?
   
5. How can these obstacles be removed?

Only one able to answer these questions correctly can solve the problems of depression and unemployment and no such person is wanted on the Brain Trust. This explains the kind of measures championed by the group and why they have made no dent on the depression. Yet the answers to these questions are so easy that the intelligence or sincerity of the one claiming or displaying ignorance may be questioned. These answers are:

1. Labor is any exertion to produce wealth to satisfy a human desire.
   
2. Men want to labor in order to satisfy their desires.
   
3. Essential to labor's human faculties are natural resources or land. These are indispensible. In addition capital is a helpful but not indispensible factor which can be kept available when there is no interference with labor's access to land but which can be monopolized and made hard to obtain when access to land has been obstructed or closed.
   
4. Ownership of land which empowers owners to refrain from using it and to prevent others from doing so. They are further encouraged to make such bad use of their power by a tax system which penalizes industry and thrift and encourages land speculation.
   
5. By making unprofitable the withholding of land from use. This can be accomplished through transfer of taxation from industry and its products to the value of land aside from value of improvements upon it, and by making these land value taxes high enough to absorb the entire annual rental value.

While some braintrusters are honestly ignorant of these answers there are others, including the leading one, who only pretend to be, and thus consciously and deliberately are misleaders. Their tenure of office depends upon defending economic fallacies. For the same reason economic fallacies are taught in universities by professors who know better. Such false educators are largely responsible for bewilderment prevailing among statesmen concerning economic matters and helplessness in dealing with the depression displayed by presidents and legislators now making themselves pathetic as well as comic spectacles.