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John R. Commons Quotes
1862–1945 United States
John Rogers Commons (October 13, 1862 – May 11, 1945) was an American institutional economist, progressive and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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Liberty, as such, is only the negative of duty, the absence of restraint or compulsion.
Legally, the term liberty means absence of duty, or rather the limit of duty.
The binding power of custom is its security of expectations. What has happened before may be expected to happen again, and he who arbitrarily disappoints expectations must be restrained or punished.
Other races of immigrants, by contact with our institutions, have been civilized—the negro has only been domesticated.
Liberty is absence of restraint. Freedom is participation in government.
The concept of property itself had come up out of the common law and carried with it the idea of a natural, or common-law rights of liberty to acquire, use and dispose of physical things.
The ‘liberty’ of one is his permission to act as he pleases, supported against interference by the power of the concern or government
Historically, land taxes are commutations of physical rents into money-rents, and taxes are not something taken from private property by the sovereign, but property is sovereignty taken collectively from the King by his tenants.
An institution is defined as collective action in control, liberation and expansion of individual action. Its forms are unorganized custom and organized going concerns. The individual action is participation in bargaining, managing and rationing
Since institutional economics is behavioristic, and the behavior in question is none other than the behavior of individuals while participating in transactions, institutional economics must make an analysis of the economic behavior of individuals.
It would not be incorrect to say that all capital is invisible value, in that it is the present value, not of physical things, but of the hopes of the future aroused through confidence in the now invisible but expected transactions of the future.
Liberty is as much a matter of compulsion as duty, but where duty says to a person that he must or must not, liberty says to other persons that they must not interfere with that person, or that they even must help to prevent still other persons from interfering, if necessary.
The boot and shoe makers, either as shoemakers or “cordwainers,” have been the earliest and the most strenuous of American industrialists in their economic struggles. A highly skilled and intelligent class of tradesmen, widely scattered, easily menaced by commercial and industrial changes, they have resorted with determination at each new menace to the refuge of protective organizations.
The aim of this volume is to work out an evolutionary and behavioristic, or rather volitional, theory of value. It was commenced thirty-five years ago at Johns Hopkins University under my stimulating teacher, Richard T. Ely.
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