tailieunhanh - Luận án kinh tế - "Human and action" - Chapter 30

XXX. INTERFERENCE WITH THE STRUCTURE OF PRICES 1. The Government and the Autonomy of the Market INTERFERENCE with the structure of the market means that the authority aims at fixing prices for commodities and services and interest rates at a height different from what the unhampered market would have determined. | XXX. INTERFERENCE WITH THE STRUCTURE OF PRICES 1. The Government and the Autonomy of the Market Interference with the structure of the market means that the authority aims at fixing prices for commodities and services and interest rates at a height different from what the unhampered market would have determined. It decrees or empowers either tacitly or expressly definite groups of people to decree prices and rates which are to be considered either as maxima or as minima and it provides for the enforcement of such decrees by coercion and compulsion. In resorting to such measures the government wants to favor either the buyer as in the case of maximum prices or the seller as in the case of minimum prices. The maximum price is designed to make it possible for the buyer to procure what he wants at a price lower than that of the unhampered market. The minimum price is designed to make it possible for the seller to dispose of his merchandise or his services at a price higher than that of the unhampered market. It depends on the political balance of forces which groups the authority wants to favor. At times governments have resorted to maximum prices at other times to minimum prices for various commodities. At times they have decreed maximum wages rates at other times minimum wage rates. It is only with regard to interest that they have never had recourse to minimum rates when they have interfered they have always decreed maximum interest rates. They have always looked askance upon saving investing and moneylending. If this interference with commodity prices wage rates and interest rates includes all prices wage rates and interest rates it is tantamount to the full substitution of socialism of the German pattern for the market economy. Then the market interpersonal exchange private ownership of the means of production entrepreneurship and private initiative virtually disappear altogether. No individual any longer has the opportunity to influence the process of production