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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2011
George W. Wilson's argument would be irrefutable if one could analyze long-term economic trends in terms of monetary theory alone. Undoubtedly, Mun's point was that specie judiciously exported for purposes of foreign trade would not be “lost to die Realm,” as the bullionists feared, but would return witii interest. If, then, we could assume no change in nonmonetary factors, pursuit of the policy advocated by Mun would ultimately make a rise of internal prices inevitable, save by a “flight from gold” on a scale uncongenial to mercantilist preconceptions. So far, Mr. Wilson's logic compels a modification of my argument, and for this demonstration I am grateful.
1 It would perhaps be more correct to expect that, as the limits to expansion in entrepôt trade were approached, the process of ever-increasing bullion flows would be brought to a halt not by rising prices but by a reduction of the rate of profit in such trade to the margin below which further investment in it would not be justified. In practice, nonmonetary factors would probably have been significantly modified by that time. In the half century following the peace of Utrecht, English overseas trade, especially entrepôt trade, expanded greatly, to a considerable extent at the expense of the Dutch. During this period the price level was on the whole stable or gently falling, as it had been in Holland during her commercial ascendancy in the earlier seventeenth century.
2 I should perhaps stress that there is no evidence to show, and I do not believe, that Mun was capable of the refinements of theoretical analysis which Wilson discusses. It is, however, clear that Mun saw that the policy of aiming at an export surplus might defeat itself, even in the short run, unless the additional stocks of bullion were freely exported to expand trade.