« Sci-Fi Wednesday: Star Trek Inspirational Posters | Home | Sci-Fi Wednesday: Harry Potter Non-Spoiler Spoiler Comic »
Honnold Library Record: Economics in the Continental Congress
From the Honnold Library Record, Volume 4, Number 1. Spring 1961:
Economics in the Continental Congress
On 24 January 1783 a committee of the Continental Congress recommended that the Congress purchase a collection of books for the use of its members. Under the heading "Politics" are listed a number of works on economics. If one examines the list, one discovers that a copy of every work on economics which it was thought should be readily available for Continental Congressmen can now be found in the Honnold Library.
To anyone who even scans these interesting books, it would appear that a Continental Congressman, if he wished to preserve his peace of mind, would have done well to become a disciple of one or another of the dozen authors whose works are listed, and to ignore all others. It is remarkable with what logic and clarity all economists of those days were able to prove their fellow economists totally misled and mistaken.
It is interesting to note a few of the economic ideas which the bookish Congressman might have absorbed. If a delegate had picked up Sir Josiah Child's A New Discourse of Trade (London, 1738 ), he might have been interested to observe that Sir Josiah believed that prosperity could be restored by an easier money market and advocated that a low rate of interest be fixed by law. Several other writers in the group, such as John Locke, considered this course of action to be utterly nonsensical.
But to return to Sir Josiah. He also advocated that the poor and unemployed be placed under an all-powerful national board which should have authority over the local bodies dealing with such people. He proposed that the unemployed be set at useful work by the public authorities and that State banks be organized, where the poor could secure small loans. He suggested that the members of the all-powerful board, "The Fathers of the Poor" as they were called, ought not to be subjected to oaths, for he says the nonconformists who would be excluded by such oaths might be the very men best fitted for the task.
Going off on a different tack, the author advocated that Jews be admitted freely to trade. Jews, he said, will thereby cease to fear the government; if they do not fear the government, they will not hate it, and if they do not hate it, they will be useful, peaceable citizens. Sir Josiah Child considered crime merely a symptom, like unemployment, of a malfunctioning economy.
John Locke (The Works of John Locke, 1727) among other things is concerned with the fact that if armed forces are maintained abroad or allies abroad are supported with funds, the result is that the country giving the subsidy or maintaining the troops incurs an unfavorable balance of payments. "We have seen," he says, "how Riches and Money are got, kept, or lost in a Country; and that is by consuming less of foreign Commodities than what by Commodities or labor is paid for. This is the ordinary course of Things: but where great Armies and Alliances are to be maintained abroad by Supplies sent out (i.e., money exported) of any Country, thereafter, by a shorter and more sensible Way, the Treasure is diminished."
In Money and Trade (Glasgow, 1750) John Law appears sceptical of hard and fast rules for promoting prosperity. "The measures which have been used to preserve and increase money," he says, "have in some countries been opposite to what has been used in others: and opposite measures have been used in the same countries, without any differing circumstances to occasion them." As a means of increasing trade he proposes that merchants be subsidized. "The true and safe way to encourage the export of such goods, as do not yield great enough profit," he says, "is by a drawback. If serges sent to Holland give only 20 percent profit, 10 percent given as a draw-back will encourage their export: the draw-back given to the merchants is not lost to the nation, and what is got by the manufacture or export of the goods, is gained by the nation."
Law is also greatly concerned about the constantly decreasing value of money. "That money is of much lesser value than it was," he remarks, "will appear by the value of goods, land, and money had 200 years ago. . . . So that what five pounds bought 200 years ago, will not be bought now for 100 pounds."
In A Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages which respectively attend France and Great Britain with regard to Trade (Dublin, 1757), Josiah Tucker complains that the more workmen are paid, the less they seem to want to work. "The men," he says, "are as bad as can be described; who become more vicious, more indigent and idle, in Proportion to the Advance of Wages." He also discourses on the tendency of those seeking public office to court the favors of workmen, which, he says, has the effect on workmen of placing them "above control, frees them from all restraint, and brings down the Rich to pay their court to them, contrary to the just and proper order of Society."
Such ideas and many more the Continental Congressmen might absorb from the books which were to be provided for them. One news item from Anderson, Historical and Chronological Deduction on the Origin of Commerce (London, 1764) might have been more relished by representatives from New York or Virginia than by Congressmen from Massachusetts. "The consumption of rum in New England is so great," Anderson reports, "that there has been 20,000 hogsheads of French molasses manufactured into rum at Boston in one year, and as one gallon of molasses will make a gallon of rum, this will amount to 1,260,000 gallons of rum in one year; so vast is the demand for that liquor by their fishery and by the Indian trade."
Most of the materials mentioned here are physically located in Special Collections. For more information on those materials, contact Special Collections.
What is the Honnold Library Record?
The Honnold Library Record, published from 1958 until 1975, was the publication of the Honnold Library Society, the friends of the library group, founded in 1954. All the issues of the Honnold Library Record are available online in the CCDL in the Honnold Library Record Collection.
— michael | July 19, 2007 03:02 PM | The more you know
