In the business of life we are all economists, businessmen and directors. In my case, for example, an employee, for the Autonomous University of Madrid whose raw material of work is immaterial: educational and intellectual investigation, especially in the subjects of Political Economy, Public Treasury and Law Economics. For that reason, and because of my professional deformation, I should warn you since the editorial staff of this business newspaper sees fit to publish my articles with certain regularity. I do not usually propose in them, except in some passages, concrete measures of economic or technical character to apply without more ado and automatically in particular tasks, in general economic politics or in those of company or institution management where each individual is owner and lord. I am not going to propose any predetermined behaviour code. Sincerely and personally, I do not trust too much in the measures from the collective and generalising peaks. I trust a lot more in 10 small concrete measures that each citizen takes daily in his particular surroundings that he is familiar with and that maybe can be glimpsed reading what I have written here or even that which others write. That means proposing in one sentence about 400 million different and original concrete measures per day only in Spain. Those, I believe, are the important ones. Start being more specific each one of you at your fancy through the readings, because in my case I am warning you in advance that I usually philosophise more than the average economist. Those words of Diógenes Laercio in the beginning of his letter to Meneceo are justification: Nobody hesitates to philosophise because he is too young, nor because he is too old does he get tired of philosophising. Because nobody is too young or old for the health of the soul."

For that reason I want to repeat that truth of Perogrullo forthrightly: The economy: it is human or it is not economy. This so evident statement is forgotten daily by our rulers and politicians and, what is more worrying, by many economists, managers and union leaders. If they take a trillion decisions daily in the markets, each one of them is carried out by the intellectual and volitional human capacity that sums up their subjective ambitions in always original personal preferences. Paraphrasing Rothbard when he summarizes the essential of Von Mises' contributions, we can say that in the world of the economy the yearnings and the varied individual projects operate; successes or failures are harvested continually in each one of the multiple risky decisions and time is always omnipresent with its surprising dynamics. Man does not react like a mineral or a locomotive. Each person's incomprehensible mystery cannot be treated in the same way as one who studies the programmed trajectory of a missile with nuclear head.

The idea of the managerial function is intimately related to a concept of human action understood, on one hand, as an essential and eminently creative characteristic of all human beings and, on the other hand, as the group of coordinating abilities that spontaneously make possible the emergence, maintenance and development of civilization. Let us say again that the dilemma manager-worker disappears. We are all managers. The great majority are employee managers, but managers from the moment that anyone acts to modify the present and to reach objectives (profit) in the future. Enterprising attitude consists of trying continually to actively look for, discover, create or notice more convenient and new human objectives and means. Shackle would also say that the future is always uncertain in the sense that it is still to take place, and the actor-manager-worker only has from it certain ideas, imagination or expectations that he hopes to make reality by means of his personal action and interaction with other actors. In the mind a kind of coalition among the experiences of the past takes place continually that picks up in its memory a thousand different details in the habitual daily course, and their simultaneous and creative projection towards the future.

Wanting to interpret and trying to explain this I would dare to say what I wrote in A Hastily Written Economy: that each one of us is an eternity that wanders misled by today's daily roads without soaking up the deep significance of each insignificance. The past ancestral eternity lives today even in the most insignificant and original actions of each individual and is projected, with the flexibility of responsible personal freedom, onto the whole interpersonal unfolding of the future multi-secular eternity."

Joseph John Franch Menéu
NEGOCIOS, Friday December 13th 1996