Why is it ... that anti-monopoly legislation (and litigation) get so little help, as they evidently do, from the textbook [economic] theory? Surely the answer is that the main issues of principle --- security on the one hand, freedom and equity on the other, the issues that lawyers, and law-makers, can understand --- have got left right out. They cannot be adequately translated, even into terms of surpluses. ... To put the same point another way. The liberal, or non-interference, principles of the classical ... economics were not, in the first place, economic principles; they were an application to economics of principles that were thought to apply over a much wider field. ... As the nineteenth century wore on, the increasing specialization of economics led to an increasing emphasis on the economic argument. Then it was discovered --- it was rightly discovered --- that the economic case for non-interference is riddled with exceptions: exceptions which may well have become more important in fact in the course of technological progress, and which certainly became of greater importance as the demands which were made on the economic system, in the direction of stability as well as of growth, became more exacting. Accordingly, since the other side of the case which had at one time been the more important side, had been so largely forgotten, what had begun as an economic argument for non-interference became an economic argument for the opposite. I do not question that on its own assumptions that argument ... was very largely right.

What I do question is whether we are justified in forgetting, as completely as most of us have done, the other side of the argument. Not that I wish to regard that ‘non-economic’ side as overriding; all that I claim for it is a place, and a regular place. I do not suppose that if we gave it this due attention, we should find ourselves subscribing ... to all the liberal princi-ples of a century ago. ... Neither side should give way to the other; but there is no reason why there should not be scope for marginal adjustments, in great things as well as small. ...

I have accordingly no intention, in abandoning Economic Welfarism, of falling into the ‘fiat libertas, ruat caelum’ which some latter-day liberals seem to see as the only alternative. What I do maintain is that the liberal goods are goods; that they are values which, however, must be weighed up against other values.

To illuminate the Hicksian proposal of non-welfaristic value of economic mechanism and/or economic policy in concrete terms, it may be worthwhile to cite a salient example of the non-welfaristic or procedural evaluation of the competitive resource allocation mechanism. It was Milton Friedman (1962, p.21) who emphasized the intrinsic value of competitive market mechanism as follows:

No one who buys bread knows whether the wheat from which it is made was grown by a Communist or a Republican, by a constitutionist or a Facist, or, for that matter, by a Negro or a white. This illustrates how an impersonal market separates economic activities from political views and protects men from being discriminated against in their economic activities for reasons that are irrelevant to their productivity --- whether these reasons are associated with their views or their color.

To bring this important point into clearer relief, Friedman (1962, pp.109-110) recapitulated it in more general terms as follows:

[A] free market separates economic efficiency from irrelevant characteristics. ... In consequence, the producer of wheat is in a position to use resources as effectively as he can, regardless of what the attitudes of the community may be toward the color, the religion, or other characteristics of the people he hires. Furthermore, ... there is an economic incentive in a free market to separate economic efficiency from other characteristics of the individual. A businessman or an entrepreneur who expresses preferences in his business activities that are