An introductory statement of the descriptive task undertaken

For a general introduction to the chapters of this Part II, I refer the reader to Sections 1.4 and 1.5; and with this reference, I shall proceed to the work at hand.

We have interpreted certain of Professor Schultz's remarks, recorded in Exhibit A at the end of the preceding chapter, as an invitation that his audience raise to mind a visualization of an economy developing over a time span of some five years while fully employed and in a state of price stability. Whatever this specialist advisor may have consciously had in mind, we shall take this as a request that the idealized states of these two aspects of the economy be tentatively specified and depicted–states of things that choosers of the law can be brought by rational discourse to agree upon as states not reasonably reacted adversely to. And it shall be our task to try to find sensible steps that practitioners of our science might tentatively take toward constructing what we shall call standard forms that depict such norms. To describe what a population or process of events looks like in fact as it develops over time is a straightforward problem with which anyone is familiar. To describe what those factual features of it are that are conveying to responsible choosers of the law a sense of dubious performance of a currently operating economic system is a somewhat more involved problem. To describe what those features of it would look like were they such as would not induce a rationally arrived at sense of disapprobation is yet more involved.