As Michael points out, Davenport wrote the following: "Economics must cease to be a system of apologetics, the creed of the reactionary, a defense of privilege, a social soothing sirup (suc), a smug pronouncement of the righteousness of whatever is with the still more disastrous corollary of the unrighteousness of whatever is not." (Davenport: Economics of Enterprise, p. 528). In the chapter where the quote appears, Davenport tried to provide evidence that most of the property in the U.S. had been acquired through plunder and ethically questionable acts (including rent seeking). The income acquired from the ownership of this property could be called an "unearned increment." He did not have a serious plan to rectify the situation, since the "evils" had already been done and since, anticipating the later Austrian central planning theorists, he believed it is practically impossible to identify the "unearned increment." An inheritance tax was his only proposal. He believed that the modern economists (that is, the reactionaries) were wrong to justify the existing distribution of wealth and income on the grounds that it had resulted from the contributions of the resource owners to consumer satisfaction. More to the point, they were wrong to justify capitalism on these grounds. But they were not wrong to develop the pure theory of distribution, since this is the start of a true understanding of what he called "the regime of price" (Chapter 2 and 3 of EOE). Today, following Mises, we might call this the pure market economy. Or, following Knight, we might use the term "perfect, or pure, competition." (Of course, many economists had used concepts of this sort, including Pareto.) In my view, his insight into this theory is deeper than that of Mises and Knight in some respects. He is probably best regarded as one of the few who understood the true significance of the marginal productivity theory of distribution -- an economist who delved deeper into that theory than its founders, namely, Menger, Jevons, Walras, and Clark by developing the "entrepreneur view." His posthumously-published critique of Marshall is particularly telling with respect to the further development of microeconomics in the profession, although it is not easy to read. Now that I have had an opportunity to look at Samuelson's Nobel lecture, it seems evident that the idea of "a monopoly of the reactionaries" has a very different meaning to him. Samuelson was extolling the virtues of mathematical economics and Pareto optimality, particularly with respect to the new general equilibrium welfare economics, which was built on Pigouvian foundations, and public goods theory. The basis for these ideas, he believed, was the principle of maximization, which he had helped to develop through mathematical modeling. He also took pleasure in the idea that some these analytical techniques were being used in business. To help make the point that these "tools of economics" should be widely used, he reported on words that he seems to have recalled from Davenport. He writes: "H. J. Davenport, who was the best friend Thorstein Veblen ever had (Veblen actually lived for a time in Davenport's coal cellar), once said: 'There is no reason why theoretical economics should be a monopoly of the reactionaries.'" While the words apply to Samuelson's theme, the reference to professional economists has a completely different meaning. I have no idea why Samuelson used this reference to Davenport. In a broad sense, Davenport seems to have meant something entirely different. I suspect that he would have cringed over the use of Pareto optimality models to build justifications for market intervention. Yet this was a common theme of Samuelson. Pat Gunning