# Three Sacred Cows of Economics By Alex Rubner **URL:** **By** Murray Rothbard **Published:** June 1, 1974 --- “Alex Rubner is a British economist whose work is scarcely known in Britain, let alone the United States.” Alex Rubner is a British economist whose work is scarcely known in Britain, let alone the United States. Yet he has written a truly admirable work, which deserves wide reading among laymen and economists alike. His style is especially suited for such a wide spectrum of readers, for it is a splendid blend of scholarship and clear, hard-hitting, and lucid writing. Rubner is not afraid to call a spade a spade—and hammer his and our enemies into the ground with it! The world needs far more works that blend scholarship and passion, and when the result is liberatarian, our admiration must know no bounds. Specifically, Rubner's book is devoted to an evisceration of three “sacred cows” of Establishment Economics: “The GNP Fetish,” “The Myth of Forecasting,” and “The Virtues of Economic State Planning.” Rubner's attack on planning is fine, and contains much wisdom, but is a little too confined to British examples to excite the American reader. But his attacks on GNP, and on economic forecasting, are superb—in fact, the best to be found anywhere in economic literature. The denunciations are at the same time comprehensive and uncompromising, and they make mincemeat of both of these fetishes of the economic—and political— professions. Every page is a gem, but perhaps we might best quote Rubner's response to the plea by the head of the British National Union of Railwaymen, Frank Moxley, that automobiles be nationalized as “wasteful,” with private ownership of a car permitted only if government authorities were convinced “that it was absolutely necessary.” In our absurdly ecological age, Rubner's reply is particularly timely: Frank Moxley repeatedly uses the word “waste” because he thinks that his readers, the railwaymen and others, think that “waste” is something bad. But is it? . . . To use privately acquired goods in a manner considered wasteful by planners is part of our raised standard of living. So-called physical waste is not always the antithesis of human welfare but may actually enhance it. If one values leisure highly, and can afford to use it, one does not darn stockings or repair broken kitchen chairs, but buys replacements. In the olden days small soap remnants were saved in order to mould out of them a large cake of soap; Moxley's railwaymen are too affluent today to spend their time on this. Of course national resources are squandered—and valuable dollars wasted on increased pulp imports—when each family today buys one or two daily newspapers. Before the war, two or three penurious households sometimes clubbed together to buy jointly one copy of a newspaper. Shall we now return to this system? Or, perhaps better still, send everyone to read his papers in a public library? . . . The people of Britain derive pleasure from underutilized television sets, cars and newspapers. The happiness, derived from their wasteful use, may not be recorded in the conventional GNP, but it is no less profound for that. _Reviewed by Murray N. Rothbard / Economics (273 Pages) / BFL Price $9_