Often enough one has seen governmental price regulations to be incapable of providing cheap bread in lean years. Every day we may see strikes failing, when they are directed towards the attainment of wages “not justified in the economic situation,” as it is commonly expressed. The question, therefore, is not whether the “natural” or “purely economic” categories on the one hand, and the “social” categories on the other, do exert any appreciable influence on the terms of distribution; that both do, no intelligent person will deny.
The sole question is this: how much influence do they exert? Or, as I have expressed myself several years ago, in reviewing an older work by Stolzmann entitled “Die Soziale Kategorie,”
The great problem, not adequately settled so far, is to determine the exact extent and nature of the influence of both factors, to show how much one factor may accomplish apart from, or perhaps in opposition to, the other. This chapter of economic theory has not yet been written satisfactorily.I should like to go almost so far as to say that, until quite recently, not even a serious attempt has been made to elaborate this problem by either one of the two great schools that compete with each other in the perfecting of our science: the theoretical school, represented primarily by the well-known “marginal-utility theory,” and the historic or sociological school, which, in its struggle against both the old classicists and the modern marginal-value theorists, likes to place the influence of control (Macht) into the very heart of its theory of distribution.
—Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Control or Economic Law (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010), 7, 9.
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