Free Republic

In a prior piece, Where the Body Is, The Vultures Are Gathered, or, For Whom the Toll Peals Part I, I introduced the concept of transactions, values, and prices, for both labor and finished goods. In this section, I continue, looking at the Marxist theory of value and its applications and misapplication to the present day, and then move on to newer and/or more complex economic situations. We have seen how quickly an example of a simple exchange, between a blacksmith and a villager, becomes very complex with just the addition of more villagers, more than one blacksmith, and the...

The celebrated British apologist and essayist, G.K. Chesterton, had a good friend, Hilaire Belloc, who is now largely forgotten, but whose fame in his day caused George Bernard Shaw to refer to the pair as the “Chesterbelloc.” Among his many interests (such as writing a Foreword to a collection of P.G. Wodehouse short stories!), Belloc wrote a number of books and articles on the subject of economics. One of his most intriguing works was a book entitled The Servile State. In this book, written before the fall of the Russian Tsar and the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia, Belloc...