Notes

[1]	Quote by Pierre Manent in his book « Cours familier de philosophie politique » (p. 170 en collection Tel de Gallimard).
[2]	Example of an economic transfer by providing a service: the farmer who uses a tractor with ad hoc equipment to voluntarily clear snow from the public road. Another example: individuals and associations who take on the chore of collecting rubbish in a place for a walk, on a beach or a playground, which is also voluntary. These services are of such a nature that they can be sold to a public body or another owner. The tax is a transfer: what has been owned by a taxpayer becomes the property of the public treasury. Contributions to a so-called pay-as-you-go pension scheme are also transfers: what was owned by the contributors becomes in the first instance the property of the scheme which, after deduction of management fees, uses this levy to pay life pensions; the contributing generations are to the generations thus pensioned like children who support their parents, which is different from what happens for so-called funded pensions; In principle, these are formed through economic exchanges and not through transfers. But this last point is rejected by those who insist on the refusal to include dividends in an economic exchange between the capital agents and the operators of this investment. The defined economy shows that this refusal represses a recognition that considerably cleanses the system of economic exchanges: see, taking the time to immerse oneself in it, the arguments for this consolidation in the form of primary propositions of economic science and major orientations of economic policy. This is all the more important because there are transfers that do not appear to be transfers: capital gains and losses are transfers made by means of an exchange.
[3]	Dans Variété - Études philosophiques. The underlining is by Paul Valéry.
[4]	Hence in the logo of onto-economy-politics, the letters arranged around a compass: C for competitions, E for jobs, M for currencies, I for income. The magnetic needle points to E
[5]	Malthus, Thomas Robert, 1766-1834. Say, Jean-Baptiste, 1767-1832. Ricardo, David, 1772-1823. La Critique de l’économie politique de Karl Marx, 1818-1863, parut en 1859, Le Capital - Tome 1 en 1867.
[6]	Propos d’Octave-Louis Barenton, confiseur, ancien élève de l’école polytechnique.
[7]	See the definition of “methodological individualism” in Wikipedia.
[8]	L’anticapitalisme - Essai de réhabilitation de l’économie politique, p. 33 of the first edition (1974, Arthaud), p. 37 of the second edition in French (1978, Flammarion). In Refonder l'économie politique Third paragraph of the section À bas la révolution ! of chapter 1.
[9]	Télécharger l’intégralité de cet ouvrage
[11]	Reprint of an article originally published by economiematin.fr le 29 décembre 2016
[12]	Seuil 1979 for the abridged French translation. The cited passages are taken from this translation, pages 186 and 188 of volume 2.
[13]	Emphasis added by Popper. The same applies to the emphases that follow.
[15]	N° 3803
[14]	Emphasis by Popper. The same applies to the following underlines.
[16]	Cognitive relativism: negation of the possibility for knowledge to access reality
[19]	Fire considered as one of the materials or principles of the composition of bodies. Joseph Priestley, 1733-1804, Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier, 1743-1794.
[18]
[17]	Thomas S. Kuhn (1900–1967), American philosopher. The References of the work by R. Boudon refer to La structure des révolutions scientifiques, 1962, Flammarion.
[20]	The principle of the excluded third, also known as the excluded middle: between two contradictory propositions, one is true and the other false if, and only if, the exclusion of a third proposition is admissible.
[21]	L’extrait cité comporte ici une parenthèse donnant, en allemand, une référence précise dans l’œuvre d’Emmanuel Kant, 1724-1804
[23]	To speak, in this context, of "demand" is a convenience in distinguishing one of the two offers present. Commodity demand, as a general category opposed to commodity supply, does not exist, contrary to the illusion given by the use of money. Let's talk about supply and demand, but when it comes to economic exchanges, let's not forget for a moment that it is always a question of supply in exchange for an offer.
[22]	It is often useful, even essential, to specify that the concept of a petition of principle is distinct from the notion of a position of principle. A position of principle is based on considerations among which there may or may not be one petition of principle or several. A petition of principle is always either a paralogism — an error of reasoning in good faith — or a sophism — an error of reasoning in bad faith... but quite obviously the Petition of principle of Sophisme.com is quite in good faith and in the best of what is on the same subject on the internet.
[24]	In footnote 46 of the cited work, references to a study published by these two researchers in 1992.
[25]	The opinion and the social power in the sense of these words in Tocqueville’s work, and particularly in the second De la démocratie en Amérique. The cited passage is found on pages 189 and 190 of Tocqueville aujourd’hui by Raymond Boudon, published by Odile Jacob. The emphasis is mine.
[26]	It is only in a figurative and pejorative sense that the adjective « vénal, ale », in the literal sense of that which sells or can be sold, is used to qualify a behavior: a venal judge, a venal love, a venal pen, etc.
[28]	Any new merchandise is not a new material object (see previous note).
[27]	Argument for this statement in the next chapter, proposition 2.11. By atavism, the word "commodity" first evokes a material object. The services exchanged for remuneration must nevertheless be seen as commodities, otherwise one thing and its opposite are maintained: yes, these exchanges are marketable, as evidenced by the fact that they determine the existence of markets; No, because in each of these exchanges one of the two terms is not a commodity.
[29]	Between the economic analyses and prescriptions that make use of the notion of “human capital” and those that refuse to do so, there is in any case a rupture whose consequences cannot be merely venial.
[30]	Economic vocabulary, PUF, coll. Que sais-je ? n° 2124, page 88 de l’édition 1996.
[32]	[2] A sense of the word “economy” that conforms to what a definition is in the logic of finite sets. This conformity is indispensable to fixing what economic science has, as its own, to treat and economic policy, as its own, to manage – and thus what political economy has, in life in society, as its own to study and to guide.
[31]	But as early as its first edition in 1975, there is an entry “Marchandisage”… which refers to “Merchandising — Adjustment of the characteristics of a product for marketing purposes.”
[33]	Fayard, 2006.
[34]	Pages 160 et 161.
[36]	A cooperative managed so as to generate the maximum of rebates to distribute to its members adopts this aim ipso facto.
[35]	A word one of whose senses is : an illegal contract by which a sub-contractor undertakes to have work carried out by a labor force recruited for the purpose, without supplying materials.
[37]	The subordination link is an extra-economic criterion because, in all commercial exchanges—including that between an employer and an employee—the contract is synallagmatic. This means it entails reciprocal obligations and, consequently, a state of mutual subordination in both law and fact..
[38]	This other category does not include enterprises, all financial institutions included.
[39]	Apports en nature : biens corporels (terrain, immeuble, machine, etc.) et incorporels (brevet, créances, clientèle, etc.). Apports en industrie : ceux d’une activité professionnelle que l’apporteur a déjà exercée.
[41]	The observation on scarcity introduced by Ricardo played such a great role that the verbatim of this introduction appears twice in this site.
[40]	First edition in 1817, third and last during its author's lifetime in 1821
[42]	n the final edition published during Ricardo's lifetime, Chapter 1 contains 7 sections. Section 1 itself comprises 21 paragraphs. It is therefore at the very beginning of his Principles of Political Economy that he placed his observation on scarcity, which has played a major role since time immemorial through the syllogism—as famous as it is logically untenable: since what is rare is dear (expensive), dearness (high price) proceeds from scarcity.
[43]	The rent earned by a household from its investments and the oil rent—or formerly the land rent received by large agricultural landowners—have only one thing in common: they are still referred to by the same word. This is unfortunate. In the rent drawn from letting out a property, there is no capital gain. In the rent that an individual derives from investing their savings, a capital gain does not necessarily enter into it. In the case of oil rent, as in other rents generated by economic scarcity, what it contains is primarily or exclusively capital gain. One way to distinguish these two kinds of rent is to speak of the “oil windfall / stock-market windfall / real-estate windfall / gold-price windfall / etc.” so that rent becomes more narrowly associated again with another noun derived from it: rate of return.
[44]	Product of labor as defined in proposition 2.13.
[45]	“In capital”, that is, in the form of permanent financing of an enterprise. This can apply either to an enterprise being created or to one being transformed so that it is no longer indebted. To achieve this, it is essential that its financing (that is, the liabilities side of its balance sheet) consist chronically of nothing but capital, with no credit whatsoever (loans, leasing, or trade credit), and likewise no factoring on the assets side of its balance sheet.
[46]	In credit, that is, in repayable deposits remunerated by interest rather than by profit distribution. Bonds are placements in credit. Trainers, bankers, and journalists enamored with “modern finance” tend to claim that credit is merely a form of capital, and vice versa—this conflation exposes the economy to numerous crises.
[47]	Proposition 2.19.
[48]	Proposition 2.20, argument 2.
[49]	Proposition 2.20, argument 1.
[50]	Definition, designation | A given word or expression to designate a definition, in the sense of that concept in the logic of finite sets, always matters. The choice of a name can nevertheless be arbitrary because, all things considered, several terms are equally suitable.
[51]	Management : Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, first published in 1974 by William Heinemann Ltd. The quote is taken from chapter 6.
[52]	Cash holdings :see the definition of the Académie française.
[53]	See the definition on the site plan comptable.
[54]	See the definition on the site plan comptable.
[55]	See the definition of “claim” on the site jurislogic.fr.
[57]	See the definition of tangible fixed assets in plan comptable.com
[56]	See the definition of intangible fixed assets in plan comptable.com
[58]	See the definition in WordNet.
[59]	See the definition in PlanComptable.com.
[61]	Not only to companies : the obligation of the annual inventory applies to sole proprietorships.
[60]	More precisely, it is the distinction between debit and credit set out by Pacioli. The systematization of the distinction between stocks and flows was yet to come, introduced a century later by Goessens (1594) then Stevenin (1605).
[62]	See the definition of “income statement” in PlanComptable.com.
[63]	See the definition of “income” (produits) in PlanComptable.com.
[64]	This sense is not yet mentioned by the most recently revised French-language dictionaries. Patience?
[65]	For enterprises alone, a repayment of borrowed principal is a cash movement, with no effect on earnings. Whereas understating an enterprise’s earnings by entering such a repayment among the charges would be fraudulent, elsewhere the opposite is a lie by omission… a lie still practiced by any number of politicians, senior officials, bishops, statutory auditors, presidents, and economists. Let us then see what happens when one of them goes, in a personal capacity, to their banker to obtain a loan for a real-estate purchase or for major maintenance and improvement works. The banker takes stock of the client’s financial situation by counting, among the client’s current and future charges, all the debt-amortization installments, principal repayments included. This way of drawing up the income statement of any economic actor other than an enterprise is incontestably realistic, to the point that it would oblige economic science to regard it as the right one even if no one used it.
[66]	See also the definition of “charge” in Plan Comptable.
[67]	See also the definition of “earnings” in Plan Comptable.
[68]	This practice replaced the one that consisted in crediting a provision account whose balance was listed among the financing stocks, on the liabilities side of the balance sheet accordingly.
[69]	In Objective Political Economy (OPE), the exploited value per share (VEPA) is the standard book value per share — (shareholders’) equity divided by the number of shares — since proposition 6.6 states that a company’s capitaux propres and its capital exploité are the same object. The recognized Anglo-Saxon names are therefore adopted: book value per share (VEPA), dividend on equity, DOE (the annual dividend rate, TADD), and equity ratio (the capitalization rate, NTDC; nationally, the national average equity ratio, NAER). Equity is preferred to capital here precisely because, as OPE stresses, these funds belong to those who place them, not to the enterprise — which is what equity denotes. This equity is neither the bank-regulatory capital ratio nor capital employed (equity plus long-term debt, as in ROCE). OPE’s foundational capital — opposed to credit, and distinct from quasi-capital — is this permanent, risk-bearing equity.
[70]	| Capital gain | Transfer | Let us observe the effect of a rise in negotiable assets, that of real estate for example, when it is markedly higher than that of incomes over several consecutive years. During this period, the state of the market puts sellers in a position to impose on buyers a level of dearness that provides sellers with a capital gain. The dearness from which a capital gain arises then generates a transfer of economic exchange value, which goes from the buyer to the seller to the amount of the capital gain. By the successive definitions whose starting point is those of economic exchanges and transfers, incomes come exclusively from exchanges of elementary commodities whereas the capital gains generated by asset sales constitute a category of transfers.
[71]	The introduction into French law of the “company with variable membership and capital” dates from the middle of the 19th century. Analogous legislative measures were taken at the same time throughout Europe.
[72]	As shown in the first footnote of the argument of the preceding proposition.
[76]	See the definition of “distributive justice” in Wikipedia.
[77]	See the definition of “commutative justice” in Wikipedia.
[78]	The comparison is transposable to cases in which the shares of one of the two companies, or of both, are refundable. For each of these transpositions, the conclusion remains the same.
[73]	Dictionnaire économique et financier, Yves Bernard, Jean-Claude Colli, and Dominique Lewandowski, Inspectors of Finance, Éditions du Seuil, first published in 1975. In this quotation, “receipts” are the income (produits), in the accounting sense of the word, made up entirely of revenue in enterprises that, over the period considered, received no subsidy.
[75]	Same source as the previous quotation, with between these two excerpts: “Profit has three functions: – it remunerates the providers of capital who have taken risks and who have made contributions in labor; – it represents an efficiency constraint; – it makes it possible to free up resources to finance investments ”. In this assertion, “functions” is a disguised way of saying “reasons for being”, for one must divert attention from the logical status of the assertion that follows. To say, indeed, that profit “sums up the whole of the firm’s aims” is logically admissible only if it is a hypothesis demonstrated by the doxa. Since this is not the case, and since it will surely never be the case, because the enterprise is one thing and there are in reality only people who have aims, this assertion conveys an untruth administered by begging the question.
[74]	Vocabulaire économique, Frédéric Teulon, Agrégé de l’Université, Presses Universitaires de France, coll. « Que sais-je ? » n° 2624, 1996.
[79]	See the definition of “employment” in Wikipedia.
[80]	See the definition of “principle of subsidiarity” in Wikipedia.
[81]	No income (including profit) is, in the hands of those who receive it, a margin. More generally, not every amount of a sale is a margin.
[82]	But there is no universal definition of what a gross margin is, any more than a semi-net and net margin.
[83]	Contrary to what the above quote suggests, all or part of an income can be earned by barter. One case in which this is still commonly practiced is that of fractions of full wage, which are made up of "benefits in kind".
[84]	One wonders if one has to be an economist not to see it, and then to miss what it results from strictly speaking economic.
[85]	Op-ed published in Le Figaro on 23 June 2006.
[87]	See the reference to "Mark Blaug" in Wikipedia.
[86]	See the reference to "Léon Walras" in Wikiliberal.
[88]	Any supply sold is a commodity by definition, between the time it is offered for sale and the time it finds a buyer. Every supply sold by n enterprise always includes that of at least one service, the sale, but not necessarily that of a good. In this chapter, we use the word supply to refer to what enterprises sell, it being understood, but it is obvious, that enterprises do not have the exclusive right to be suppliers, particularly in terms of services exchanged for their remuneration.
[89]	Alleged universal scarcity, maximization of profit elevated to the rank of imperative imposed on any contractual enterprise other than "social", in particular.
[90]	See the definition of "Price Earning Ratio" in Wikipedia.
[91]	Léon has not paid his last mortgage instalments as well as his last electricity and gas bills. Previously, he paid these disbursements through rent that he received. But the tenant no longer pays. A judge is seized of Léon's case. The latter, who has not hired a lawyer, pleads: "I can no longer pay these instalments because I am no longer paid the sums with which I used to." The judge began by opposing him that a way of managing his affairs was not enforceable against his creditors. In saying this, in his heart of hearts the judge once again ruminates that politicians who allocate public revenues to categories of expenditure contravene a duty that the law orders.
[92]	Wilson's model (the formula), which is all the more a great classic in manuals on inventory management and operational research because its graphic representation is spectacular (see page 7 of this document), has as its mathematical foundation the theorem that has just been stated, without its designers and then its users having realized it to our knowledge. This can be deduced algebraically. It should be noted that in terms of supplies and stocks, the notions of acquisition cost and cost of ownership lend themselves to mismanagement, and more broadly to economic reasoning. In the case of a quantity discount, reconciling the lower cost of acquisition with the additional cost of ownership does not indicate which is the most cost-effective solution. The latter is, in fact, the one that provides the best margin return on invested stock. Far fewer circumstances than are generally accepted justify a slowdown in stock revenue, in other words productivity. Just-in-time is often a remedy that consists of curing a headache by cutting off the head, with the resulting commercial and environmental damage.
[93]	What is fully demonstrated is the law of tendency towards the equalization of all direct rates of return of the same membership, as long as the comparability of remuneration of the same category (wages, dividends, interest) is freed from obstacles to competition) and other prizes. This ranges from the sectors of entrepreneurial activity to the products sold individually to their end buyers. A people who want the full exercise of this law has chosen capitalism to maximize labor incomes, under the constraint of saving placement income sufficient for structural full employment, rather than the mercantilism of capital gain which can and does not want to contribute to less structural underemployment than by reducing the lowest wages. By agreeing on this preference, the people of the said people are working effectively for the establishment of more commutative and distributive justice. As long as he does not take the economic means of this efficiency, how could it be that he does not dissipate too much of his energy in illusions that lead him to despair of his elected representatives and, sooner or later, of his own sovereignty? Where are the other treatments he has at his disposal to reduce the damage that businessmanship inflicts? Education, of course, but on condition that it does not consider the market economy to be fatally mercantilist, as almost all our citizens do when the question "what is an enterprise in general?" is put to them. The prevalent answer is indeed of the kind "an organ whose aim is the maximization of profit and capital gain", just as the prevalent answer to the question "what does the market economy naturally maximize?" is of the same barrel.
[94]	More colloquially it says money, a word that in this use has a rich palette of slang synonyms: wheat, embers, flouze, fric, galette, grisbi, rushes, maille, sorrel, pèpètes, pèze, picaillon, pognon, ronds, sou, thune, clover (Le Robert, entry Argent, II).
[95]	The expression "exchange of commodities for commodities" gives a fairly complete account of an elementary economic reality when, as recalled at the end of the next point, only are the services of labour and investment provided in exchange for their respective remuneration expressly recognized as commodities. See Chapter 2 where it is also explained why currencies are not commodities.
[96]	On the fact that economic exchanges, in other words market exchanges, are a finite subset of social exchanges, see Introduction to the Definite Economy / Delimiting the Field.
[97]	Jacques Rueff: see wikiliberal.org.
[98]	Monetary Regulation and the Institutional Problem of Money, first published in 1953 in the Revue d'économie politique, section VIII – The Institutional Problem of Money, first paragraph. The following quotation from Jacques Rueff is the fifth paragraph of the same text.
[100]	Page 290 in Arthaud, page 345 in Champs Flammarion, where this sentence, underlined by its italics, is the last of a paragraph of which the first half is as follows:"In this day and age, the idea that the reference to gold is a relic of the past is firmly anchored in most minds. Those who support it [...] draw from an indisputable fact a consequence that is foreign to it. I will call this reasoning "Professor Triffin's illusion" because it was the famous Yale University professor who made the most systematic exposition of it, consisting in "proving" that gold will be gradually eliminated from the international monetary system in the same way and for the same reasons as it has already been in the monetary circulation of each country. The indisputable fact on which Professor Triffin relies is that men are using more and more abstract instruments of payment. Metal money was gradually replaced by banknotes, then fiat money ceded most of the ground to scriptural money with the generalization of payments by set of entries and the more frequent use, for current expenses, of credit cards. This evolution has certainly not yet come to an end. It clearly reflects a progress in economic rationality. But this same rationality requires [...] that the principle of equality be respected in exchange. Now, how can we expect exchange to become value for value if the instrument through which it normally operates does not have an objectively determined value? »The "objectively determined value" that Fabra referred to is a fixed price, between a very close high and low, of a "quantum of the commodity chosen as a standard". In favor of such a pegging to the conditions that were fulfilled from 1870 to 1914, there is a great reduction in the fluctuation of exchange rates, which has all the more repercussions since international trade is a major provider of jobs and enrichment. However, this is not the only way to achieve less currency depreciation and, in so doing, less monetary disturbance of prices, in any case gradually anchored to those of them which are the minimum hourly wages of the countries from which what is sold comes. By refuge in real estate ownership in particular, the leakage of investments most exposed to currency depreciation is a loss in the healthiest financing of job creation, a penalty aggravated by the increase in housing costs resulting from these losses.
[99]	The best system for getting rid of gold is the title of chapter 13 of the Essay on the Rehabilitation of Political Economy entitled Anticapitalism (15 chapters). The phrase quoted is found under the subtitle Qu'est-ce que l'étalon or?, page 280 of the Arthaud edition (1974), page 334 of the Champs Flammarion edition (1979).
[101]	Fabra: "The 'objectivists' think, according to Jacques Rueff's strong expression, that money is served, in the sense that its demand is and must be subordinated to the impulses of economic life. The 'subjectivists' are inclined, like Keynes, to see in money an 'elixir' that should be injected into the economic body in order to stimulate its activity" (page 295, Arthaud, page 352, Champs Flammarion).
[102]	And the lavish spending of Louis XIV at Versailles, unrelated to the genesis and course of the French Revolution? The Concorde, the liner France and the Plan Calculus, unrelated to the mediocrity of the economic results of the Fifth Republic, since the 1970s and until now? Etc.
[103]	For more on this subject, read the entirety of chapter 13 of Paul Fabra (work cited above) or chapter 11 of Capital for Profit (1991, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Maryland) bearing in mind that the author stated: "I now consider the English version (which incorporates some changes) to be the more authoritative."
[104]	|Growth| The growth in the purchasing power of an income is not only about the quantity of services and goods that can be purchased. It continues to exist when it is only about the quality of the services and goods that can be purchased.|Decay| Wherever the decrease in quantities consumed is an increase in quality of life, long live this degrowth!
[10]	Refounding Political Economy, chapter 1, "The Reversal of the Foundation of Political Economy," first section, "Political Economy Has Regressed to the 'Pre-Classical' Age," end of the eighth paragraph. The bold emphasis is my own. On the same topic, see Walras as Read by Valéry..
[106]	Paul Fabra, Refounding Political Economy, Chapter 6, Last Section. "Faced with the complexity of economic phenomena, modern economists often resort to the easy parable of the chicken and the egg. What is the cause and what is the effect? The circularity of the exchange provides them with an additional, and apparently peremptory, argument for refusing to answer. (… : …) What characterizes modern political economy is its renunciation, open or concealed as the case may be, of the principle of causality. This last underline is my doing, as it is obvious that the renunciation identified by Fabra plays a decisive role in the inability to peg a stable framework of economic policy.
[107]	Even in times of non-expansion, including in the depths of the worst recessions.
[108]	In the Economic Science part of this work, the chapter on wages deals with the distribution of total labor income. The key to this distribution is the inequality of the remunerations of labor. Not to recognize this, by defending the doubly false idea that wages, like all prices, are governed principally by the law of supply and demand, is a denial of reality. The national understanding that refutes this denial, replacing it with the observation that high wages reduce those below them and that low wages raise those above them, confirms that there is an inevitable sharing and objectively recognizes the necessity of establishing a national minimum wage.
[109]	The label “operating expense(s)” has the drawback of suggesting that nothing relating to investments belongs among expenses. Generally, the most relevant breakdown of expenses is by nature of cost. In every kind of management, financial charges may always be one of these breakdowns — one of the expense items. But as regards amortization, the argument of the next directive, on budgetary results, points to a difference — highly important for the truth of the accounts — between managing an enterprise and managing any other entity, public bodies and households included.
[110]	Income proper, then, by definitions that truly are definitions, before any transfer and solely through market exchanges. How is the distribution of total income governed by the system that these exchanges establish? And what, in turn, do the inequalities in the remuneration of labor govern? The economists who answer these questions most accurately give parties and political figures a competence indispensable to the soundness of their economic doctrine. It is not credible that the electorate should remain lastingly indifferent to these answers and to what they imply. What makes the market economy systemically beneficial can be rejected only by those who judge it doomed to ruin, however it is practiced. Let the others ask themselves this: must economic science clarify the division of total income between its two components, and the division governed by wage inequalities? Is that not indispensable for avoiding error about what makes a market economy well regulated? Is a nation’s government economically competent if its doctrine is marred by such an error?
[112]	A) Taxes, sales, voluntary gifts, and thefts; these other kinds of transfer nonetheless share the feature of being, in accounting terms, credits for the entities that receive their proceeds — hence the apt generic term “revenues” (produits) and the deplorable use of “income” (revenus) instead of “revenues,” which is merely a confusionist anglicism. B) Every paid public job is a market transaction, like every other paid job. The effective abolition of market exchange in respect of paid labor is unworkable. An official prohibition of the market economy is inevitably followed, sooner or later, by the no less official re-establishment of a market economy. C) Eliminating the dictatorship of the financial markets through reforms — including those bearing on the general management of the public levy — takes part in the transformation of one market economy into another. But when will we have a budgetary policy whose statement of motives has more breath to it? Let us show that in this matter, at the crossroads of several problems, there is enough to instill in the nation a great ambition, good for it and for the unions of which it is a member.
[111]	In this perimeter, and according to a typology of French public law, there is no Industrial and Commercial Public Establishment (EPIC); but there are, besides the parliamentary bodies and the central and territorial administration, the Administrative Public Establishments (EP[C]A) — an organizational chart of the Leviathan beside which those of the largest private enterprises are light.
[113]	That this provision is then well managed is another matter. Too many enterprises that have duly amortized their fixed assets find themselves unable to self-finance a substantial part of their modernization.
[114]	In France, the organic law on finance laws (the LOLF of 1 August 2001) prescribes the annual publication of three results for the consolidation of the general budget, the annexed budgets, and the special accounts: the “budgetary result,” the “result in general accounting for the financial year,” and the “cash result presented in the financing table.” The “budgetary result” is the balance of expenditures actually disbursed and receipts actually collected: cash accounting only, as a bank statement shows what it consists of. The “result in general accounting” is the difference between the revenues and the expenses of the year “at the moment service is rendered,” on account of revenues that have not been recovered and expenses that have not been paid during the year. Making this latter result become and remain fully consistent with the definition to which this note is attached does not plunge us into an abyss of administrative complexity.
[115]	French leaders and officials are not yet troubled by the announcements to the public of Social Security “deficits,” without specifying whether these negative differences are between cash inflows and outflows or between revenues and expenses. If it is the former, why are the latter passed over in silence? To hide the fact that the general management of Social Security, whose budget is very heavy, is gravely deficient?
[116]	|Competitiveness| Let T be the world total of exports, P the share of that total originating from the national territory. The competitiveness of the national economy has risen, stayed stable, or fallen according to whether the relative share P/T has risen, stayed stable, or fallen. The competitiveness of an enterprise is defined similarly, with the total T of the market on which the enterprise sells and the share P of that market that the enterprise's sales constitute.
[117]	If a tax return contains the entry “Acquisition of shares of capital,” what is meant will generally be judged clear. Only commercial and civil companies (real-estate, land, professional) have capital. Not every stock-exchange placement is in capital — notably because of listed bonds — and not every placement in capital is necessarily on the exchange, or in negotiable shares. The distinction between shares of capital, or shares, according to whether they are negotiable or refundable, remains to be popularized and better exploited, although it is widely practiced (the public limited company or limited-liability company versus the cooperative with variable capital, in particular). The distinction between capital and quasi-capital is even less known, though highly important.
[118]	Baudelaire, last line of the first stanza of the eleventh poem of Les Fleurs du mal, Le Guignon — that is, bad luck, ill fortune, hard luck.
[119]	As long as structural underemployment advances, an ever more pronounced rise in the average yield of placement in capital; as soon as structural full employment draws nearer, an asymptotic decline in that same yield.
[120]	Baudelaire, Le Guignon, first stanza.
[121]	It remains ideologically taboo to say that certain shares of capital are stock. Let us press on.
[122]	This yield, in this case a rate of return, is distinct from any capital gain or loss. The rate of return of a rent for the lessor of a movable or immovable asset is distinct from the possible capital gain or loss that the sale of the asset yields, a sale that will put an end to that gain — to that rent in the original sense of the word.
[123]	Civil real-estate, agricultural, and professional companies, notably in French company law.
[124]	Including debts from bond issues.
[125]	In the Economic Science part, Chapter 11, Prices, establishes the normality of this permanent reduction in a market economy, thus contributing to the demonstration that this economy is, under certain conditions, a highly refined instrument of commutative justice.
[126]	Chapter 8, Distribution.
[127]	This economist is French; the address from which the paragraph reproduced without any alteration or omission is taken was delivered in French.
[128]	The extension of capital gain capitalism at the expense of yield capitalism led Pierre Manent astray when, around the year 2000, he invited his students at the Paris Institute of Political Studies to recall “how the prodigious growth of stock-market capitalization seemed in recent years to be on the way to reconstituting that class of rentiers which the progress of industry and democracy had appeared to have condemned” (Cours familier de philosophie politique, Gallimard, Tel collection, p. 69). This was a contribution to peddling the conflation of rent with capital gain. The growth of stock-market capitalization is a product of, and in return produces, speculation destructive of the common good. This speculation, superadded by pension funds to the speculation whose social contribution is positive (by tending simultaneously toward the yield of a prudent family man and of the widow of Carpentras), procures rent for people who have reached the end of full-time professional activity. The belief that “the progress of industry and democracy” has the effect of eradicating the “class of rentiers” belongs entirely to economic pseudoscience, for three reasons:I/ Political economy can be objective only by replacing the distinction of social classes with that of roles, since the same individual — and all the more the same household — fills several roles, and impartiality does not allow one to wish that one be sacrificed for the benefit of another (for example, an employee and shareholder should not normally receive, for each of these titles, remunerations that offset each other, nor see his prerogatives reduced or increased in one of these roles because of the other).II/ Each of these roles is a means of exercising economic democracy.III/ In all socio-professional categories, estates too weakly made up of placements in shares of capital that pay dividends — that is, rent properly so called — disserve “the progress of industry and democracy.” Democracy, by means of two facts:the choice of one placement rather than another is the economic counterpart of the vote cast in elections by universal suffrage;to placements in shares of capital are attached voting rights — rights for which it is entirely logical that, even in a cooperative setting where the number of shares per member is capped by statute, one who holds n times more shares has n times more votes than another.
[129]	Arbitrary on the labor market through employer contributions; arbitrary on the capital market through self-financing by undistributed earnings; arbitrary on the markets where enterprises make their sales and their margins through many devices of commercial promotion (including gifts, which are not gifts) and, increasingly until now everywhere, with prices less and less comparable. More genuine competition, exclusively in a context of globalization, is highly doubtful, especially under a regime of volatile exchange rates and of priority given to capital gain over yield.
[131]	Reach this aim by focusing public action on the least wealthy majority as regards “greater prosperity”? And, or first, by reinforcing public aid to the most deprived? The narrowing of the range between the highest and lowest wages net of income tax, as well as between the highest and lowest pay-as-you-go pensions also net of income tax, does not fall within what a budgetary policy is responsible for producing. Raising the prosperity of the least wealthy majority faster than that of the wealthiest minority is better achieved by sorting out the natural responsibilities of the different economic roles than by believing, or letting it be believed, that it suffices to take from the wealthiest to redistribute to the least wealthy. Now this belief, real or feigned, plays a large role in public opinion’s endorsement of the very principle that enterprises pay a tax on their earnings. That liability is nonetheless counterproductive, and it is to be distinguished from the tax levy in the hands of the holders of property income; failing this distinction, too little effort is made to sort out the economic roles — those of enterprises and those of individuals and non-commercial private associations that place in the capital of enterprises are, in particular, different. Public opinion’s endorsement of the very principle that enterprises pay a tax on their earnings will recede once it becomes common to explain why this practice harms full employment, increasing only illusorily the public funds allocable to aid for the most deprived and to other works of collective enrichment.
[130]	These amortizations are the interest payable to lenders plus the repayments of borrowed principal. When tax receipts cover the totality of public charges, debt amortization included, new public borrowing serves only to finance public investments. In public finance, as in the management of a private association whatever its aim, compressing charges does not necessarily go through cutting investments. In theory and in practice, the distinction between charges and investments is as fundamental as the broader one between flows and stocks. An elected official who says “We must reduce public spending, and therefore accept, for a time, lower public investments” is making a fallacious statement.
[132]	The fraction of the capital supplied by a single member to a cooperative is capped by statute, generally in the form of a maximum number of shares per member.
[133]	A leveraged buyout, LBO, consists in financing a large fraction of a company’s takeover through bank or bond debt. The interest and the principal repayments on this debt are then drawn from the cash of the acquired company. With the many equivalents for stock-market ends, and public over-indebtedness, the occurrence of financial crises that generate economic crises is made inescapable. It is these crises that regulate créditist liberalism, but at the cost of social damage.
[134]	There is true capitalism only when the fraction of enterprises’ financial resources (hence of their liabilities) made up of placements in capital is generally greater than that of credit in all its forms (bonds included). Now the logical counterpart of these placements is the distribution of profits whereas the remuneration of the credit service is ensured by the payment of interest. In true capitalism, the major key rate is normally one of profit and not of interest. In creditism, it is the opposite.
[135]	See the definition of “tax ruling” on the tax authority’s website.
[136]	Let us recall that we reserve the term “shareholder” for any holder of a share of capitalcapital (share capital, since it is that of a company), whether or not this share gives access, at its liquidation, to a capital gain (the mere offsetting of monetary erosion through distributions of free shares is not a capital gain), according to whether the shares are negotiable or refundable (cooperatives, mutuals: in French law, companies with member-employees and variable capital).
[137]	Françoise and François are shareholders. Since the delivery to civil society of the tax ruling on the taxation of earnings of enterprises, they receive markedly more dividends than before, including as remuneration for the placement in shares of capital of cooperative companies. Moreover, the supply of dividends is: 1) at last accompanied by the indication of a yield rate — the equivalent, for placement in capital, of the APR (TAEG) for credit (see 2.2.1); 2) increasingly often paired with an offer to subscribe to an increase of capital. The improvement in the average yield of Françoise and François’s share portfolio can only have, as consequences: 1) a greater proportion of share placements in their assets; 2) a markedly increased ease for commercial companies — whether agricultural, industrial, or tertiary — in mobilizing capital and creating durable jobs; 3) a retreat of capital-gain mercantilism through the rise of yield capitalism.
[138]	“Blurring of risks” and “organizational opacity” are two expressions used by Armand Hatchuel, professor at Mines ParisTech, in his column published in Le Monde, Tuesday 15 July 2014: BNP Paribas, la débâcle de la gouvernance.
[139]	All these excerpts are taken from La mort de l'État providence : vive les assurances sociales !, by Jacques Bichot and Arnaud Robinet, Manitoba / Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 2013, 178 pages, chapter La fiche de paie vérité, pp. 59–70, then later in the present work, chapter Retraites : passage à un système unique par points pour une plus grande justice sociale, pp. 135–151. Once this book has been read, and above all in the light of earlier and later articles by Jacques Bichot, it appears that a different title would have better conveyed the substance of the argument: La faillite contagieuse de l'État providence : vive les sécurités économiques ! The employer shares of contributions assessed on wages are a fiction that moves all the further from full exchange as it bears on considerable sums (of which the part going to transfer-based retirement pensions contributes heavily to less freedom and responsibility than after reconstruction of the system so as to make it fundamentally equitable and financially unsinkable — which is in no way irreconcilable, provided one steps out of the box of ill-conceived economic redistribution).
[140]	First paragraph of the chapter La fiche de paie vérité, page 59. The first sentence of the following paragraph is: “This operation can be carried out very simply, without changing the cost of labor for the employer, the wage net, or the resources of the social security funds.”
[141]	Jacques Bichot and Arnaud Robinet give an excellent overview of this history, in the two passages respectively titled Le paternalisme patronal, ancêtre de la sécurité sociale and Les cotisations patronales, survivance d’un passé révolu, from the bottom of page 59 to the top of page 63. As far back as there are written traces of what domestic-service contracts were, it emerges that in-kind provisions by the employer (food, lodging, even clothing) constituted part of the employer’s burden in performance of the employment contract, with the ever-present temptation for the employer to regard this part as a gift when it is in economic exchange for the services provided by the employee.
[142]	Page 63, under the title Les cotisations patronales, miroir déformant de notre vision des choses.
[143]	Page 63.
[144]	Page 65, last paragraph of the passage titled Les cotisations patronales, portes d’entrée de regrettables stratégies.
[145]	Pages 69 and 70, first two paragraphs of the passage titled Éviter les conflits sociaux stériles.
[146]	Page 66, first paragraph of the passage titled Comment se passer de cotisations patronales ?42.86% of the whole wage wage (1,500 / 3,500) = 75% of the net of contributions (1,500 / 2,000)
[147]	Page 69.
[148]	Page 70, last paragraph of the chapter La fiche de paie vérité.
[150]	The set of holders of income proper has as its elements the individuals who draw an income from their labor, the same and other individuals who draw an income from their placements, and public and private associations, families included, all non-commercial, among them foundations, which likewise draw an income from their placements. No enterprise is part of this set. The life annuities of pay-as-you-go pensions are treated as income, although they are not, since they are paid through transfers of the proceeds of contributions, these contributions not being contributions to job creation as subscriptions to capital increases are.capital.
[149]	The shares of capital of a cooperative or a mutual are in fact shares, but refundable instead of negotiable. Full shareholder exchange is fully established only when it is practiced in all enterprises constituted as companies, cooperatives and mutuals included.
[151]	Every effort deserves a waget, as the saying goes. Literally speaking, this is not true, for two reasons: what is exchanged for a wage is the service provided by an individual by means of the effort they have taken, and not the effort itself. Not all the services an individual takes the trouble to provide are in exchange for a wage and it often happens that it is services of this kind that prove to be the most precious. Between a political economy that neglects these facts and another that explicitly takes them into account, a conceptual rupture is set in motion. Throughout the respective theoretical paths of these two distinct economies, this rupture can only become more pronounced, particularly when it comes to the remunerations that constitute incomes proper.
[152]	A “social model” whose pillars are the artifice of the subordination link, the fiction of employer contributions and the progressivity of “compulsory levies” instead of their proportionality to income, can only prove, in the long run, riddled with perverse effects, because it contravenes too much not only elementary economic realities but also the full working-out of political equality through the contribution to common charges “apportioned equally among the citizens according to their means,” the last phrase of Article 13 of the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen of 26 August 1789. When this “equally” is interpreted as meaning “at progressive rates” and not at identical rates for all, the will expressed is that of maintaining or reinforcing the balance of power between the wealthiest and the least wealthy, even at the cost of reinforcing segregations.
[153]	Salaries, fees, commissions, royalties, emoluments, wages, sales bonuses, attendance fees, freelance fees, tips, bonuses, payments, pay, stipends, hourly fees. “Fee notes” and “statements,” likewise, are in reality invoices that make up a revenue of which only a part will be allocated to the remuneration of labor.
[154]	The principal distributions of flows inherent in the practice of market exchanges are three in number: the distribution of total income (chapter 8), the distribution of total labor income (chapter 9), and the distribution within enterprises, among the margin-production centers of the same systemic level, of the remuneration of capital and of the costs that are common to them (chapter 11). Inequalities between private wealth holdings vary, in the long run, largely as a function of these three distributions.
[155]	Let us add here that estimating a larger gap between the median and minimum labor remuneration would be just: 1) if the scope of the law of supply and demand were as broad as it is traditional to believe; 2) if it were most often by buying at the lowest price and selling at the highest that an enterprise makes itself viable; 3) if the lasting competitiveness of exporting enterprises depended chiefly on the minimum labor remuneration to which these enterprises have access; 4) if lowering the weakest labor remunerations could bring about a recovery of investments; 5) if, in the event of unemployment, the relief designed and managed so as not to become lasting substitutes, and on-the-job training, could not appreciably improve the employability of those who struggle most to be hired.
[156]	These techniques must be non-fiscal. What is to be increased is the social body’s mastery of the distribution of the shares of total labor income, as far as needed by abolishing its confiscation by a bureaucracy over which the holders of the highest labor remunerations inevitably end up gaining the upper hand. Redistribution, especially when pushed toward a negative-income-tax scheme, can only have the effect of taking part in this confiscation and of making taxation a tool whose complexity obscures economic relations and reduces the rise of all labor incomes, beginning with the weakest. To try to correct through redistribution what is manifestly badly done in distribution is, economically as much as politically, an infringement of the general interest.
[157]	Pp. 135–151. The chapter from which excerpts are cited has eight sections. The excerpts retained in the present argument are taken from the first four sections and placed under their original titles. The titles of the four other sections are (5) La souplesse des points : réponse au besoin du quotidien (6) Les points, meilleurs amis des couples (7) Comment passer des annuités aux points ? Le timing (8) Sans technique, le timing n’est rien !
[158]	Note 1, p. 136 of the cited book. For example, at the SNCF it is the wage of the last month, including bonuses and gratuities, provided the employee has held this grade for at least six months.
[159]	DM note — The boldface is mine.
[160]	DM note — The following paragraph is the third after the one just quoted.
[161]	DM note — The following paragraph is skipped; its first sentence states its subject: “Alas, the French social partners manage the supplementary schemes by playing, without enough restraint, on the contribution rate, as was seen in 2013.”
[162]	DM note — The following paragraph is the third and last of this section.
[163]	DM note — Three paragraphs skipped.
[164]	DM note – This boldface is mine. The following paragraph summarizes (here too the boldface is mine): “À la carte retirement with actuarial neutrality (…) puts everyone before their responsibilities, that is, in a position to choose but with the obligation to assume the consequences of the choice made. Beyond the technical aspects, it is a philosophical attitude: the choice of responsible freedom and of equity, as opposed to the bureaucratic constraints and the granting of privileges to some and penalties to others that one observes in the current French system.” But the rest of the chapter is also to be read and, from page 135 to page 151, this whole chapter to be reread in extenso.
[165]	Actuarial mutualization: the distribution of a probable cost assessed by means of probability tables established by actuaries.
[105]	In any matter whatsoever, a policy which does not concentrate on the essential or which considers as essential what is ultimately only incidental usurps its claim to be in truth more a policy than a jumble of expedients. "You are taking us from expedient to expedient instead of focusing, and focusing us, on what is in reality the main one with regard to the general interest!": this reproach made to managers and their advisors is equivalent to blame.
[166]	First edition in 1974 by William Heinemann Ltd. This book is now available in digital format.
[167]	Managerial Economics (Prentice-Hall, 1951), p. 28
[168]	Houghton Mifflin, 1967
[169]	Historical and satirical reference to Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi.