Rueff’s polemical volume brings together the Épître aux dirigistes and Le Dilemme français, applying one argument to both doctrine and postwar policy: planning, rationing, wage fixing, and price controls promise social order but destroy the mechanism through which free persons coordinate production and consumption. The book is not a defense of indifference to social ends. Rueff accepts that economic life must be institutionally framed and morally directed; his target is the dirigiste belief that justice can be achieved by immobilizing prices.
Mais votre hostilité au mécanisme des prix tire son origine de motifs plus généraux encore. Vous êtes profondément et sincèrement heurtés par un régime confiant à des forces, que vous tenez pour aveugles, le soin de dessiner la structure sociale.
English translation: But your hostility to the price mechanism springs from still more general motives. You are deeply and sincerely offended by a system that entrusts to forces you regard as blind the task of shaping the social structure.
The central distinction is between intervention compatible with prices and intervention against prices. For Rueff, price is not a mere accounting convention or capitalist privilege; it is the practical condition that links desire, scarcity, sacrifice, and remuneration. When prices are allowed to move, they transmit information and incentives without requiring a central authority to command every buyer and producer.
Car, parmi les conditions qui affectent le comportement des hommes, il en est une qui joue un rôle décisif : le prix, facteur déterminant des sacrifices exigés du consommateur et de la rémunération offerte au producteur.
English translation: For, among the conditions that affect the behavior of men, there is one that plays a decisive role: price, the determining factor of the sacrifices demanded of the consumer and of the remuneration offered to the producer.
The chapters on liberty and welfare argue that a fixed price above or below its spontaneous level necessarily leaves some buyers or sellers without counterpart. Scarcity then appears as queues, black markets, empty shops, idle labor, or rationing. If the state tries to repair these effects while maintaining false prices, it must allocate goods administratively and progressively restrict choice. Thus the political promise of freedom is contradicted by the economic technique chosen to secure it.
Dès qu'un produit est taxé, les acheteurs font queue à la porte des boutiques où on le vend.
English translation: As soon as a product is subject to a price ceiling, buyers queue at the doors of the shops that sell it.
Rueff’s account of production is equally important. Modern specialization means that producers do not work for the good they personally consume, but for the monetary return that sale permits. If controlled prices make production unremunerative while making consumption artificially attractive, policy simultaneously increases demand and discourages supply. Apparent cheapness therefore becomes organized shortage, and egalitarian language conceals a reduction in the real standard of life.
Par la fixation des prix à un niveau sensiblement différent de celui auquel ils se seraient spontanément établis, vous ne pouvez pas ne pas diminuer grandement le niveau de vie des hommes.
English translation: By fixing prices at a level appreciably different from that at which they would have established themselves spontaneously, you cannot fail to reduce greatly the standard of living of men.
The constructive answer is what Rueff calls social liberalism: a social policy that intervenes through law, taxation, money, subsidies, allowances, credit, competition rules, labor regulation, and public institutions, but does not falsify prices themselves. Redistribution may be pursued openly through fiscal means; monopoly may be checked; wages and conditions may be regulated; customs duties may be chosen; but prices must still reveal the real relation between available goods and effective demand.
In Le Dilemme français, Rueff applies this theory to France’s postwar disorder. The nation is caught between official prices and black-market prices, between nominal purchasing power and unavailable goods. Deficits, subsidies, and monetary disorder aggravate scarcity by concealing costs and destroying saving. France therefore faces a stark choice: either complete planning, with the coercion needed to impose production and consumption decisions, or restoration of price freedom within financial discipline. Rueff’s enduring claim is that abundance, liberty, and social reform are not alternatives to the price mechanism but depend on its truthful operation.
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