The concentration of the greatest possible number of means of decision and control into the smallest number of organizational entities.
Economic Liberalism, also called, Free-Market Capitalism, is the application of the general rule of private enterprise ownership under the constraint—established by the legislature and upheld by other market authorities—of sufficient competition to ensure price regulation, and more broadly, the comparability of market offerings.
Economic liberalism neither confuses the social with the economic—the individual with the merchant, the state with the enterprise—nor opposes them, as if the economy were amoral and its injustices could be corrected by the state alone.
As with political liberalism, the opposite of economic liberalism is centralism.
Economism is the interpretive framework that privileges economic methodologies and theories above all others in explaining human behavior. More precisely, within the framework of onto-political-economics, economism manifests as:
Through a boundless extension of the field of economics, economism strips the science of economics of its specific object. Economism is to economic science and policy what scientism is to science and moralism is to morality.
One of the three elementary means of all human production, alongside accumulated knowledge and new labor (Proposition 2.7). A natural resource is not in itself a commodity, nor an economic object: it acquires economic exchange value only through the addition of new labor, even if only that of gathering (Proposition 2.8; Fabra, Le capitalisme sans capital, Prologue: “resources are supplied not by nature, but by labor”).
Nature as such never creates Value (Fabra, Capital for profit, §132-8, against the Physiocrats). Should natural resources require labor to remain usable — as when air or water must be purified — they enter the category of economic goods, but this represents an impoverishment, not an enrichment: wealth pertains to the enjoyment of goods at one’s disposal, not to the possession of value (Fabra, Capital for profit, §253).
Three phenomena commonly but improperly grouped under “scarcity” must be distinguished: (1) the depletion of natural resources through indiscriminate use (“usurped growth”), where the cost of maintaining natural resources is omitted from production costs; (2) the illusion of scarcity produced by inflation and speculation on commodity futures; (3) the genuine economic scarcity of non-reproducible goods (Fabra, Capital for profit, §258; Le capitalisme sans capital, Prologue).
The question of whether natural resources are public goods is therefore misconceived: economic patrimony consists exclusively of economic objects, and no elementary means of production qualifies as such on its own (Proposition 2.8, point 6). Natural resources may, however, engender scarce commodities — land, mineral deposits, and fossil fuels, once put up for sale, become scarce commodities whose prices are determined by auction, not by cost of production (Proposition 2.19). Political economy neither prescribes nor condemns the market for non-reproducible goods; it merely ceases to justify it scientifically, leaving the choice to society (Fabra, Capital for profit, §208).
See: commodity, elementary means of production, new labor, scarce commodity, economic scarcity, economism.
Objective Political Economy distinguishes two roles that tax law merges. An ultimate taxpayer is a person who bears a tax: an individual or a private non-commercial association (3.5). An enterprise is not a taxpayer in its own right: the law obliges it to pay taxes, or to collect and remit them, but their economic incidence falls sooner or later on ultimate taxpayers, chiefly through its selling prices (3.5, 7.6). The distinction is that of public economics between statutory incidence (who is legally liable for paying a tax) and economic incidence (who bears it). Treating enterprises as taxpayers in their own right is a fiction; Guideline 7 draws its fiscal consequences.