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The Progressive Economics of John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill was an economic liberalist to oppose any government regulations of trade and prices. But he was a progressive liberalist to insist strongly on institutional reforms to correct unfair economic distribution in capitalism. He wrote that distribution is a matter of human institution solely and it can be changed by institutional reforms. He supported measures to suppress labor population such as population control and foreign colonization, but he opposed such means as minimum wage system and wage allowance system. He defended trade unions, minimum subsistence system and, most of all, partial limitations of the property ownership of land and heritage. Futhermore, he recommended laborers’ cooperative as the ideal form of firms, in which competitions are working and a cooperative is owned collectively by laborers. Like most economists of the times he expected that the stationary state where economy and population stop to grow, would come. But he thought, contrary to others, it would be a desirable state because destructions of nature and conflicts of men would not go on any more. While he supported rational socialism such as Fourierism, he criticized strongly communism which insists on violent revolution, centrally managed national economy by one authority, and perfect equal distribution. He predicted that communistic country would collapse down for the lack of freedom, struggles for power and fall of productivity.