Spencer Heath Archive

Item 866

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath on the road between Baltimore and New York.

December 1, 1955

Original is in item 860.

Nearly all businessmen recognize that profits are made out of falling prices and large volume, yet nearly all of them try to raise their prices in every possible way — like “fair trade” laws and every kind of cahoots against the public. They know better, but I guess it is the old animal habits of being predatory on their fellow men. This thing of serving our fellow man, of serving the public, for honest recompense is rather a recent invention, a recent development. How well I can remember when it was a motto of businessmen, “Let the buyer beware” — motto of the law. The courts rather recognized that, within some limitations, the seller had a right to cheat the buyer.

“Did Common Law recognize that?”

Common Law held that he was not obliged to tell the buyer anything that the buyer could find out himself, but if there were inherent or interior, hidden defects, that the buyer, who was being beware, could not possibly know about, then the seller was held responsible. Something that the seller knew and that the buyer did not know and by ordinary watchfulness he could not find out. Then the courts held that the buyer was damaged the same as though it were a misrepresentation on the part of the seller.