ECONOMICS DEPARTMENT

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Marxists have been agitating for professorships in the economics department as a matter of representation, balance, and fairness. Leaving aside the question of the validity of Marxian economics, their complaints are legitimate, for the department is conspicuously overloaded with Keynesians and monetarists. while the details of the conclusions reached by these tow schools may vary, their premises are notably similar.

what has been ignored, both by those doing the shouting and by those meeting solemnly in committees, is the fact that another significant and perhaps more important body of economic thought has been unjustly slighted, by Harvard for some years now. That body, far from dead and indeed enjoying tremendous vitality today, is laissez-faire, free-market economics. There are no laissez-fairists, no true capitalists (though plenty of state-capitalists), no "Austrians," no libertarians, no free-maketeers of any variety in the Harvard economics department. The last to be here, to our knowledge, was a disciple of the Austrian school (Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Mises) who left three years ago.

It is probably fruitless to argue that economics should be an apolitical, value-free science of analysis, that setting social objectives is outside its proper realm. If so, one can only hope that all points of view could be allowed at least token representation. With monetarists clamoring for state control of currency, Keynesians for state control of currency and investment, and Marxists for state control of these and everything else besides, is it too much to ask for a few libertarian economists, content to teach the workings of an unhampered market? Lawrence H. white '77   Marc E. Chardon '75   Christopher M. Berendes '77   Susan G. Cole '77