Justice & Law Quote by John Bates Clark

Clark’s line reads like a polite economist’s throat-clearing right before he pulls the rug out from under a cherished creed. The “law” he names is the late-19th-century promise of marginal productivity theory: in a competitive market, each worker is paid what they “are worth.” It’s a soothing formula because it turns wages into a moral verdict that looks like a natural fact. If the market pays you less, the story goes, that’s not power or politics - it’s mathematics.

Clark’s intent is more surgical than revolutionary. He doesn’t junk the principle; he interrogates its translation into reality. Calling it an “honest law” is a rhetorical trap: if the rule is fair in theory, then persistent unfairness must come from the machinery that applies it. “Vitiated in its working” is Clark’s key phrase, smuggling in everything economists sometimes try to bracket out: imperfect competition, employer leverage, discrimination, information gaps, coercive labor conditions, and the simple fact that workers rarely bargain on equal footing with capital.

The subtext is a warning about ideological laundering. Economic “laws” can function as alibis when their real-world prerequisites are missing. Clark wrote in the era of trusts, strikes, and industrial consolidation, when “the market” often meant a handful of employers setting terms. His question is a controlled detonation: if outcomes look “dishonest,” maybe the dishonesty isn’t in individual workers but in the institutional setup that lets a supposedly neutral law deliver rigged results.