If a government fixes the parity of its domestic credit or fiat money against gold or foreign exchange at a higher point than the market--that is, if it fixes maximum prices for gold and foreign exchange below the potential market price--the effects appear which Gresham’s Law describes. A state of affairs results which--very inadequately--is called a scarcity of foreign exchange.

Interference with the structure of the market means that the authority aims at fixing prices for commodities and services and interest rates at a height different from what the unhampered market would have determined. It decrees, or empowers--either tacitly or expressly--definite groups of people to decree, prices and rates which are to be considered either as maxima or as minima, and it provides for the enforcement of such decrees by coercion and compulsion.

The characteristic feature of the market price is that it tends to equalize supply and demand. The size of the demand coincides with the size of supply not only in the imaginary construction of the evenly rotating economy. The notion of the plain state of rest as developed by the elementary theory of prices is a faithful description of what come to pass in the market at every instant. Any deviation of a market price from the height at which supply and demand are equal is--in the unhampered market--self-liquidating.

The very essence of the interventionist politicians’ wisdom is to raise the price of labor either by government decree or by violent action or the threat of such action on the part of labor unions. To raise wage rates above the height at which the unhampered market would determine them is considered a postulate of the eternal laws of morality as well as indispensable from the economic point of view. Whoever dares to challenge this ethical and economic dogma is scorned both as depraved and ignorant.

We shall deal in this chapter with those measures which are directly and primarily intended to divert production (in the broadest meaning of the word, including commerce and transportation) from the ways it would take in the unhampered market economy. Each authoritarian interference with business diverts production, of course, from the lines it would take if it were only directed by the demand of the consumers as manifested on the market.

The fact that restricting production invariably involves a curtailment of the individual citizens’ satisfaction does not mean that such restriction is necessarily to be regarded as a damage. A government [p. 745] does not wantonly resort to restrictive measures. It wants to attain certain ends and considers the restriction as the appropriate means for the realization of its plan. The appraisal of restrictive policies depends therefore on the answer to two questions: Is the means chosen by the government fitted to attain the end sought?

Every disarrangement of the market data affects various individuals and groups of individuals in a different way. For some people it is a boon, for others a blow. Only after a while, when production is adjusted to the emergence of the new datum, are these effects exhausted. Thus a restrictive measure, while placing the immense majority at a disadvantage, may temporarily improve some people’s position. For those favored the measure is tantamount to the acquisition of a privilege. They are asking for such measures because they want to be privileged. [p. 749]