ABSTRACT
There is a dilemma in the comparison of two periods of time: they must have comparable features to bring them into a relation with each other at all, but also there is an essential separation so it is difficult to know what finally to make of the comparison. In tenth century Spain, a simple view was offered: the world is created afresh at everymoment . . .This is certainly oneway to abolish problems of comparison and connection. However, others, historians, economists, statisticians, or anybody else, believe things are not always so new: they dwell on connections, debts. In the other extreme, the only authority for the present is the past. In early economics, the correct price or wage is simply the price or wage that has been settled by custom and has the value which, so far as anybody can remember, it has always had. No doubt this is not as senseless as it might immediately seem from the standpoint of neoclassical economics. But it presupposes moral order, obedience to norms. There can be no price-cutting, and no charging of unexpectedly high prices. This makes sense in a steady way of life where supply and demand have created each other and settled down together. Whatever the limitations of this way of thinking, it is at least rational. Walras pursues the opposite in a logical way, but at the same time he helps foster a myth, which we have also from Adam Smith. However, withSmith it is not a deliberate and indispensable truth to bepursuedwith trappings of science. From him it can appear as a fantasy inadvertently inherited from predecessors. In the alternative system, which is more familiar to us at least intellectually, price-cutting and boosting is permitted freely, there is no law but competition, but out of this competition emerges the optimal result.
