Anybody who has read Reisman's voluminous work, please care to step in. Do you find Reisman's theory of profits propounded in the book valid? I personally think it falls right against the face of the Austrian theory of profits, which attributes profits to the disequilibrium in the allocation of resources.
I haven't yet read all of it... and hope to reread large parts of it a second time when i do. But I find Reisman's theory of profit to be analogous to the austrian terminology of 'originary interest' or an elaboration of it; it would thus be intimately related to time preference.... I am still hazy on it though!
Some evidence to back this up.
REISMAN: Yes, because in July of 1959, I was suddenly able to answer a whole series of questions that had accumulated. What triggered everything
was Hazlitt’s book, The Failure of the “New Economics.” In it he had a long quotation from John Stuart Mill on why the demand for commodities is not the demand for labor. It was then that I began to put everything together.
In the background here is a longstanding dispute I had with Murray about whether the rate of profit and interest had to fall as accumulated capital grew. I was very uncomfortable with the idea, which I likened to the sun burning out. I was wondering what would be necessary in order to have capital accumulation without the rate of profit having to fall. I was able to construct a set of assumptions and a “model,” and changed my dissertationtopic from imputation to what became “The Theory of Originary Interest.”
AEN: How involved was Mises in the process?
REISMAN: He wasn’t that involved. I wrote the whole dissertation and presented it in full. It was 640 pages. On my committee were Mises, Joseph Keiper, William Peterson, and Harvey Segal. Segal flatly rejected it. I was stunned. I had had delusions that after it came out, I would be elected president of theAmerican Economic Association. Instead, it looked for a time like I wouldn’t get my Ph.D. One of the reasons that Segal gave was that I was quoting Böhm-Bawerk in German when it was available in English. Now I knew it was in English, but I didn’t particularly like the translation. To revise the
dissertation to his satisfaction, I added thirty pages at the beginning and thirty pages at the end, and cut a large part of the rest. I made onlyone terminological change: I changed “originary interest” to “profit.” Segal then came back and said it was fine—except for the firstthirty pages, and that he hadn’t read the last thirty pages. Even today, I have the original manuscript in a fireproof safe.
Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid
Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring