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The article highlights the concept of political economy coined by well-known socio-economist Horace Greeley. Historians of economic thought, in customarily appointing Henry C. Carey dean of the American School, have generally neglected the high spokesman of discontent, Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the "New York Tribune." Horace Greeley's life and political economy stand out as clearer expressions of a young America in its middle period transition. Greeley was an awakened figure of his time. Never the totally eccentric dreamer he is frequently considered, he found himself aware that narrow parochialisms were breaking up, and he aimed to conform society to the changes under way. He saw his country as the great chance for righting wrongs- and he wished to make it a proving ground for social experimentation. Thus, he devoted his life and his paper to teaching the people to seek freedom by building a wealthy nation in which resources should be correctly utilized and special privileges should be destroyed.

The article presents response of the author on comments made by Lewis E. Hill on the papers "Toward a Reconciliation of Institutional Economics and Its Critics" and "Beyond the Market Economy Building Institutions That Work," by Clarence E. Ayres that were published in the March 1970 issue of the periodical "Social Science Quarterly." Under appropriate arrangements for doing things, that is, under an appropriate institutional structure, the propensity to truck and barter naturally entails the creation of markets, which are themselves arrangements for effecting exchange. In the U.S., the institutional structure is such that markets permeate most of the economy. For example, in August 1970, nearly 84 per cent of total civilian employment was in the private sector, all of which consists of regulated and more or less unregulated markets. Thus, employing scholar Robert L. Heilbroner's system of classification, the economy of the U.S. would be appropriately designated as essentially a market system, as the author did in his introduction to Ayres' classic. "Institutionalism and Economic Development." But Ayres objects to him, that the U.S. economy is an industrial economy. Unfortunately, his is not intended to be a cross-classification, which, if correct, would be a suitable complement rather than a substitute for the one that the author employed, since Ayres says prefatorily, and the author flatly denies that the U.S. economy is a market economy.

The article presents information on the books, "Curtailment of Non-Defense Expenditures," by Henry P. Seidemann and "Correction Please!" By a series of logical and convincing arguments, Seidemann contends that by decreasing non-defense expenditures it is possible to further the war effort through better utilization of manpower, finance and material. The alternatives confronting the nation are either to proceed without concern over the mounting public indebtedness or to strive to limit its growth without impairing essential governmental functions with the object of stabilizing the economic life of the nation. The author's suggested reductions of expenditures in: flood control, rivers and harbors, other water projects, agriculture, public domain, public welfare, highway development and executive and other general activities together with the transfer of certain costs to state and local governments would effect a reduction of more than two billion dollars in federal expenditures for non-defense purposes. "Correction Please!" is a loose-leafed visible-indexed collection of papers directed to the intelligent elite whose responsibility it is to so redesign the social system that the inborn nature of the philistine will guide him to behave better.

The article presents response of the author on comments made by Lewis E. Hill on the papers "Toward a Reconciliation of Institutional Economics and Its Critics" by Coldwell Daniel and "Beyond the Market Economy Building Institutions That Work" that were published in the March 1970 issue of the periodical "Social Science Quarterly." Hill's Comment on the exchange between Daniel and the author is perfectly right in pointing out that he gave no reasons for insisting that theirs is an industrial economy rather than a market economy, as Daniel has declared. If it is not too late, the author would like to repair that omission. In various important senses theirs is of course a market economy. Obviously buying and selling go on almost everywhere and almost all the time; and scholar Karl Polanyi was quite right in pointing out that ours is the only economy in history in which buying and selling have been as general and as significant as they are today throughout the Western world--or at least throughout the free world. The question is: significant of what? Many writers have maintained that freedom to buy and sell is the quintessence of freedom, and that people who do not enjoy this freedom are not free. This may be true. But it is not the whole story. In particular it is not the whole story of economic development. Such freedom --the market may have been a necessary condition but not the determinant of the modern Western economy.