The book “Foundations of personalist economics” aims to demonstrate that when we look at economic activity from the point of view of the human person, the assessment of many phenomena and processes occurring in the market economy becomes diametrically opposed to that formulated by representatives of the so-called mainstream economics and social sciences.
As a glaring example of a peculiar schizophrenia rooted precisely in the classical approach to these matters can be used countless cases in which employees of any company complain about their employer, that he pays poorly for their work, and when it comes to paying a professional for some commissioned service, they try to bargain for the lowest possible amount, and when they fail to do so, they complain about his rip-off. And it doesn’t actually occur to anyone that each of such cases qualifies for the intervention of a psychiatrist as a kind of – admittedly mild, but nevertheless – mental derangement. What’s more, I’m convinced that psychiatrists, too, take the same approach to their patients when they bill them for an appointment, and to retailers when they go shopping. And all this is because the absolutely rational desire of every individual to satisfy his need with as little effort as possible has been transformed into an a priori accepted “scientific” axiom in the analysis of social and economic processes in a market economy about the contradictory interests of large social groups. Travestying the Latin maxim: science locutus, causa finita. All that remains, therefore, is for the enlightened elites to implement what this “science” proposes as a panacea for this “market defect,” which is the unjust distribution of the effects of economic activity.
This panacea is the omnipotent state. Only that the effects of its activity in correcting the “defects of the market” in every country of the so-called “free world” are exactly the opposite of what is declared: instead of a more just distribution, we have, visible everywhere, a process of increasing income and property stratification on the one hand, and a progressive process of fettering both economic freedom and personal freedom – on the other.
It is neither possible nor advisable to discuss in this post all matters from the sphere of social and economic life about which assessments and opinions need to be “straightened out.” For this is the aim of the book made available here. Therefore, I encourage all those who do not allow themselves to be “concreted” into positions that are generally recognized as only right in their assessment of social and economic reality to read this item. And if they find it worthwhile, to also recommend it to friends and acquaintances.