L. Non. Mises DURRANT'S PRESS CUTTINGS St. Andrew's House, 32 to 34 Holborn Viaduct, and 3 St. Andrew Street, Holborn Circus, E.C.1. Telephone: CENTRAL 3149 (Two Lines). New Statesman and Nation IO Great Turnstile, High Holborn, W.C.I. 29 MAY 1937 Cutting from issue dated 193 AN APOSTLE OF LAISSER- FAIRE Economic Planning and International Order. By LIONEL ROBBINS, Professor of Economics in the University of London. Macmillan. 8s. 6d. Anyone who has read Professor Robbins's earlier works will know well from the title of this volume what to expect. Nor will his expectations be falsified. He will find here a series of diatribes against planning of every sort and kind-though the argument is directed especially against international planning, and con- stitutes in effect an impassioned plea for a return to international liberalism in the economic field. Professor Robbins begins with an attack on independent national planning," which he regards as the concomitant of economic nationalism, and denounces on account of its tendency to destroy the free market" and abolish the advantages of international specialisation. In this section he attacks in turn the attempts to control investment, the distortion of the economic structure by tariffs and other protective devices, such as the quantitative regulation of imports, and the restrictions on the free movement of migrants from one country to another. In the next section he directs his batteries first against bilateral trade agreements, which he regards as narrowing the possible range of specialisation and therefore leading to the misdirection of productive resources, and then against international cartels and similar agreements for sharing out the market in particular commodities between the producers of different countries. This section ends with a frontal attack upon all attempts at international regulation of wages or hours as necessarily destructive of the natural correspondence between earnings and productivities under the conditions of the free market. In the third section, Professor Robbins turns his attention to the idea of a completely planned and unified world economy under a system of communism. He is here repeating and summarising arguments already familiar from the writings of Barone and von Mises-contending, broadly, that a communist system can have no basis for determining the right economic use of the available resources because such a basis can be found only in the competitive pricing of the factors of production in a free market; and this, ex hypothesi, cannot exist in a completely unified communist world. Finally, Professor Robbins makes an eloquent appeal on behalf of international liberalism as the policy best suited to save the world from disaster, and winds up with a plea for a return to an international banking system free from political interference and a vigorous attack on the nationalist spirit now manifesting itself so strongly in economic as well as political policies over most of the world. Professor Robbins is often eloquent; and many of his arguments are, on his premises, irrefutable. The weaknesses of his book are, first, that, in its denunciation of contemporary economic follies, it too readily assumes that the "free market" would in practice yield all the advantages which can be shown to appertain to it in a frictionless imaginary world of economic abstractions and secondly that it assumes throughout, not merely that the consumer is the best judge of what he wants, but that money demand based on the capitalist system of distribution in accordance with marginal productivities will, in fact, yield the most satisfactory allocation of consuming power. If this basic assump- tion is denied, as it well may be, much of the argument-at any rate as far as it is directed against communist forms of planning -simply falls to the ground. G. D. H. COLE