“Proving that profit is economically and morally justifiable, rather then the result of exploitation, has been a central preoccupation of neoclassical economists.”

— Jim Stanford

Part 1, Chapter 4, The Politics of Economics, p. 57
Economics For Everyone (2008)

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Jim Stanford 21

Canadian economist 1961

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“These are the elements of an emerging order that may prove to be as dangerous as any fundamentalism that history has produced. For in a world where anything or anyone can be owned, manipulated, and exploited for profit, everything and everyone will be.”

Joel Bakan (1959) Canadian writer, musician, filmmaker and legal scholar

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 5, Corporations Unlimited, p. 138

“Writers after Coase have referred to the authority structure of the firm as a "visible hand" that works in combination with Smith's invisible hand. The everyday fact that employers exercise power over their employees — not news to most employees — had been a central theme in Marx's economics, but it was (and generally continues to be) overlooked by most neoclassical economists. Early in his studies Coase noted the similarity between the hierarchical organization of capitalist firms, with their reliance on command relations, and the then-existing system of centralized economic planning in the Communist countries, where production was carried out in accordance with orders from higher authorities and where market competition played little role.”

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“You have a voice, which has been perhaps been quiescent on matters economic because you have in the past deferred to the authority of the economist. There is no reason to remain quiet.”

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“Adam Smith, who has strong claim to being both the Adam and the Smith of systematic economics, was a professor of moral philosophy and it was at that forge that economics was made. Even when I was a student, economics was still part of the moral sciences tripos at Cambridge University. It can claim to be a moral science, therefore, from its origin, if for no other reason. Nevertheless, for many economists the very term “moral science” will seem like a contradiction. We are strongly imbued today with the view that science should be wertfrei and we believe that science has achieved its triumph precisely because it has escaped the swaddling clothes of moral judgment and has only been able to take off into the vast universe of the “is” by escaping from the treacherous launching pad of the “ought.” Even economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.”

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“Rather like the Bible is for many Christians, the General Theory is the essential economics reference which few economists have ever read.”

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1960s

“Proving that profit is economically and morally justifiable, rather then the result of exploitation, has been a central preoccupation of neoclassical economists.”

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Jim Stanford 21

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