During the nineteenth century experimental science asked the same question of natural law; established the power of human thought; forged the tools with which the work must be done; and bent immutable nature to the service of man through applied science. Thus knowledge, government and natural phenomena have been turned to human service. The twentieth century voices a demand that economics undergo the same process of transformation from a science which serves laws, to a science which serves society.
The claim of economics for conversion to social service is a double one. On the one hand, science has demonstrated that all so-called laws may be employed to serve men, or else, if their influence is harmful, counteracted and offset. Gravitation has ceased to be an enemy; the lightning holds few terrors; the waterfall is harnessed; the plague stayed; the desert blooms; time and space have lost their vastness; men have triumphed everywhere through the mastery of human thought. Whatever laws economics may depend upon are no more changeless than these overwhelmed laws of nature.
On the other hand, men have learned that the laws of economics differ from the laws of natural science in that the whole subject matter of economics is man made—the product of human activity. The laws of physics and chemistry are laws of a universe, which man had no part in creating. Economics, however, is the result of a man's creative energy, for man has made the economic world. Interest, wages, competition, monopoly, capital and private property are all the products of his ingenuity. The concept of law presupposes a law giver. Who gave the laws of the universe? We answer, God. Who made the laws of political economy? Man, because he constructed the economic system to which alone the laws of economics apply.
We are no more subject to the laws of economics than our ancestors were subject to the law of military tactics; than we are subject to the laws of education; or than our descendants will be subject to the laws of the sanitary science which we are creating. There are formulas of thought called "laws" in all sciences, but Napoleon overthrew and remade the laws of military tactics; Froebel restated the laws of education; and Pasteur created the science of sanitation. There is an economic law giver—man, who can unmake or remake that which he has made.
The laws of economics are in truth mere incidents in social evolution. Queen Elizabeth and her successors granted trade monopolies to favorites. The eighteenth-century economists enunciated the laws of competition and equal freedom as the great law of economics—the cureall for economic woes, and lo, the Standard Oil Company, employing the law of competition as its most fearful weapon, has created a monopoly as complete as any ever granted by an absolute monarch. If we
