The Natural Economy: A Study of a Marvellous Order in Human Affairs

The author's philosophical approach is rather like Adam Smith's Enquiry into the Nature and causes of the Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith recognised the harmony of economic law and realised that the economic problems of his time stemmed from a failure to understand how the laws of economics work. In his book John Joung has restated basic economic principles in jargon-free language for the modern reader seeking solutions to current economic problems.
Many doubt the existence of economic principles or laws, and the author recognises the difficulty of verifying economic principles by laboratory experiment, as in chemistry or physics. However, a major economic experiment was conducted in the Soviet Union - with disastrous results because economists ignored a material fact, the market. What the experiment proved is that markets can neither be abolished (black markets oiled the wheels of much of the Soviet economy) nor be replaced by bureaucrats deciding on the allocation of resources.
The Western 'market' model works more effeciently but suffers from two major structural weaknesses: it veers from boom to slump and back again; the rich grow richer and the poor poorer. Ironically, conventional attempts to alleviate these defects suffer from the same blindness as in the Soviet Union, namely a belief that bureaucrats can control the boom and slump by determining market interest rates and poverty by income redistribution through the tax system and the welfare state, thereby reducing the efficiency of the economy.
So is there an alternative? The author argues there is and that 'a true grasp of how the economy should be constituted shows it to be a thing of harmony and beauty, all its parts cooperating for the common good, and its inbuilt laws distributing benefits equitably.'

John Young has taught philosophy for many years and is the author or Reasoning Things Out, an introduction tp philosophy. He has had many articles published in magazines and journals around the world.