Baird.l 166 |_ Nov . 20 



Carey and Two of His Recent Critics, Eugen V. Bohm-Bawerk and Alfred 



Marshall. 



By Henry Carey Baird. 

 (Read before the American Philosophical Society, November 20, 1S91.*) 



Permit me, this evening, to ask your attention to a brief examination 

 of the recent criticisms of Carey by two economists the one an Austrian, 

 the other an Englishman. Although these two writers treat the economic 

 problem, each from an entirely different standpoint, one is as remote from 

 an appreciation of the truth as the other; and further, neither recognizing 

 what constitutes the great fundamental principle in Carey's system, they 

 have both left his position unassailed, as indeed it is unassailable. The 

 Austrian is Bohm-Bawerk, Honorary Professor of Political Economy at 

 the University of Vienna; the Englishman, Alfred Marshall, Professor of 

 Political Economy at the University of Cambridge. 



Prof. Bohm-Bawerk has published two ponderous treatises, the first 

 intended to be destructive of other men's reasonings and theories, and is 

 entitled, "Capital and Interest, a Critical History of Economical Theory;" 

 the second, designed to be constructive of theories of his own, is entitled, 

 "The Positive Theory of Capital" whatever a "positive theory" may 

 mean, seeing that man's vision, mental as well as ocular, being limited, 

 and thus short of the capacity to take in the whole situation, he can have 

 no absolute or positive knowledge nothing more than his poor faculties 

 permit of. Mr. Bohm-Bawerk's first book, as translated by Prof. Smart 

 of Glasgow, makes of text, 8vo, 428 pages; the second, as translated, 8vo, 

 426 pages, while a distinguished professor of political economy, who 

 thinks well of the author's labors, has recently assured me that the mar- 

 row of these 854 pages might have been put into forty pages. Such is the 

 thoroughness of this Austrian savant that he inflicts upon the student of 

 economics twenty-one times as many words as the ideas he possesses are 

 worthy of in the presentation. As for myself, I can say that I have care- 

 fully and critically read the whole of these dreary pages dreary because 

 of an ever recurring sense of the uusoundness of the author's premises, 

 as well as of his conclusions. 



The net result of Dr. Bohm-Bawerk's "Capital and Interest," wherein 

 he charges Carey, in what he says of interest, of being guilty of "a tissue 

 of incredibly clumsy and wanton mistakes," is that "Present goods possess 

 a greater value than future goods ;" that a " loan is a real exchange of pres- 

 ent goods against future goods;" and "Present goods possess an dgio in 

 future goods. This agio is interest." 



Such is the actual product of 428 pages of the most complex, confusing, 

 narrow, hair-splitting, and arrogant criticism, criticism, too, by a man 

 who has himself built up a superstructure which rests up:m a fallacy. 

 This fallacy consists in the fact that the writer has included in and treated 



