Chapter dzDz: Hutt and Keynes ȀȆȈĻroughout his many writings (for example,ȀȈȆȂ) Hutt denounces
union wage scales and strikes. Even the mere possibility of strikes deters
productive investment and so the growth of real incomes. Even for me, no
great admirer of unions, his repeated fulminations against them become
downright boring.
Hutt’s book ofȀȈȃȃ, containing proposals for postwar Britain in par-
ticular, further expounds his diagnosis by displaying his passion for recon-
structing the world along idealized competitive lines. Drastic antitrust
laws would prohibit strikes, lockouts, and boycotts; contracts or conspir-
acies to restrain output, trade, or exchange or to take part in collusive
monopolies; price discrimination; amalgamations, mergers, and holding
companies; acquisition by a corporation of shares or debentures of other
corporations or purchase, as a going concern, of the assets of competi-
tors; and interlocking directorates. A State Trading Board would have
the right to compete with private enterprise, to expropriate property, to
impose schemes for coordination, synchronization, and standardization
upon groups of independent firms, to determine hours and conditions of
labour in certain circumstances, to certify quality, and to issue cease-and-
desist orders. A Labour Security Board might require young people to
accept specified training or apprenticeship and might penalize failure to
attend regularly and perform with due diligence. A Resources Utilization
Commission would require State corporations and owners of public util-
ities to practise marginal-cost pricing, unless aggregate receipts would be
less than fixed cost plus avoidable cost. Hutt gave a definition of marginal
cost and added: “In the interpretation of this definition recourse may be
had to the text-books of economics” (ȀȈȃȃ, quotation from p.ȅȁ).
I doubt that Hutt would still, late in his career, have advocated such
drastic steps toward making reality conform to textbook chapters on pure
and perfect competition. In the intervening years he, like so many of the
rest of us, presumably learned much about the interrelations between eco-
nomic freedom and human freedom in general; he presumably became dis-
enchanted about turning to government for solutions to market failures.
But his book ofȀȈȃȃremains symptomatic of an orientation that Hutt
apparently did hold throughout his career—a concern to trace macroeco-
nomic difficulties to impediments to the ideal working of markets and
to seek remedies through microeconomic reconstructions. In his book of
ȀȈȆȃ(pp.ȀǿȀ–Ȁǿȁ) he still suggested that antitrust action, if not perverted
by demagogic vote-seeking, would be an appropriate and important ingre-
dient of policy for full employment. Pre-Keynesian economists whom he