Spencer Heath Archive

Item 600

Recollection by Spencer MacCallum immediately after a conversation

No date

Nothing is income in the economic sense except what has been contributed en masse to the market and is now drawn out in variety as well as quantity. Keynes and his whole school consider production versus distribution rather than contribution versus distribution.

What Adam Smith calls value in exchange exists only at the point of exchange. Following his badly confused predecessors, Adam Smith divides value into two categories: value in use, which is not economic value but only a subjectivism, and value in exchange, which he says arises only at the point of exchange. And he is correct about that. The current economists have degenerated badly from Adam Smith. He had some blind spots as who hasn’t.