WARREN BURGER ON ECONOMICS

In his copy of H.H. Overstreet, The Mature Mind (1949), Warren Burger wrote down a few thoughts on the relationship between economics and politics. One of them is below, and I note it in the hope that a good friend of mine who works at the FTC will find it amusing. The full page is immediately below; it is page 166 of Overstreet.


Overstreet begins his discussion of economics with a reference to the origins of the words "economy" in the Greek word for household. Burger underlines both "household" and "household unit" and draws a bracket to the left hand margin, where he writes:

"If we stayed closer to the Greek meaning we would need less of antitrust laws, FTC + even labor unions."

It is a bit of an odd statement: it seems to presume collective ability to choose earlier economic forms - we could "stay closer" to a form of economic life that is pre-modern and pre-industrial. This idea is in some tension with Burger's view - expressed elsewhere - that society grows incrementally. See my posts below, particularly here, where he writes that "mystics and romantics dream good dreams but they want to leap over centuries. Man does not leap over centuries. . . ."

Arguably, a longing for Greek forms of economic life is the ur-form of romanticism (at least in its German variant). It's not clear that this short note expresses such a longing, but it's also not clearly unfair to raise the point.