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Eating Without Working: A Moral DisquisitionStuart ChaseIt is true that the modern rule has one important exception. It is not applicable to that 2 per cent or so of the population which Veblen has characterized as the kept classes. Those who live by virtue of the absentee ownership of profitable investment, whether in lands, buildings, royalties, or stocks and bonds, are totally exempt from its compulsions. It is manifest that in so far as they live on the usufruct of their portfolios they eat without working. Fortunately the classical economists have been at some pains to rationalize this breach of a great moral principle. It appears that the kept classes consume without producing now, because in the past they have produced without consuming. They are justly entitled to a "reward for abstinence." This would be news to many young gentlemen and ladies in exclusive finishing schools; it would be news to every fortunate gambler in real estate and stocks; news to all the recipients of engraved certificates of esteem from the house of Morgan; it would be news to Mr. Charlie Mitchell and the million-dollar bonus boys--corporate, not khaki--but so the classic apologia goes. And certainly no group in the community is more alert to the moral virtue of diligence, application, and industry, on the part of others, than the kept classes. "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do." Even child labor is defended on the grounds that it keeps children out of mischief. Indeed a perspicacious psychologist might amuse himself with the theory that lack of useful work in a given group is compensated by their profound regard for the necessity of useful work at other points in the social structure. The economic morality of work stands, then, for 98 per cent, more or less, of the population, charmingly and persuasively encouraged by the remaining 2 per cent. Impinging upon this principle, however, comes a thoroughly unmoral economic reality. Its pressure is already immense, and day by day grows stronger. Raw natural energy, harnessed in a prime mover and yoked to an operating machine, is destroying human work. The curve of technical invention is cumulative and tends to grow, according to Dr. William F. Ogburn, at a geometrical rate. It is perhaps the strongest economic force in the modern world; nor can it be stopped short of scrapping what is known as Western civilization, and retreating to the handicraft of the Middle Ages. The economic reality of the automatic process and quantity production has a steadily declining use for human labor, particularly manual labor. What it does demand is efficient consumption of its fabulous output. Unless its serialized machines and processes are run at approximate capacity on the "balanced load" principle, it cannot properly function--as in the present depression. It demands efficient functioning at the cost of wrecking the whole economic structure. To function it must have millions and millions of the sturdiest sort of consumers; consumers with admirable digestive tracts and great powers for depreciating persona equipment. Slowly, under this imperative, consumption is becoming, as a matter of economic reality, more important than work; purchasing power more important than man hours. Slowly, reluctantly, even kicking and screaming, industrial nations are being driven to the hitherto abhorrent notion that the consumer must be furnished with purchasing power whether he works or not. Two years ago in this republic the word "dole" carried rather more opprobrium than the word "racketeer." Yet the dole marches on, five hundred millions of it in the last Congress. It is touching to watch the tortures of the moralists caught on the horns of this dilemma; one school of them seriously proposes that the output, rather than be allowed to fall into the hands of the consumer, should be destroyed. A billion pounds of coffee, millions of bushels of wheat, thousands of bales of cotton, uncounted gallons of milk have recently been subjected to holocaust and destruction, thus preserving the economic morality of the wayfaring citizen. He has not worked, so he must be prevented from consuming. This censorship, however, like another recent noble experiment in prohibiting consumption, has not served economic realities, however much it may have served the cause of beautiful morals. The jam in the industrial mechanism is not relieved by even such monumental measures of deliberate waste. The consumer must be permitted to consume. There is no other final outcome to the pressure of the technical arts. The 98 per cent must absorb, with or without working, even as the 2 per cent have done hitherto. That this will reduce the relative advantages of conspicuous consumption on the part of the 2 per cent is regrettable, perhaps, but inevitable. A few business men and a few college professors saw the handwriting on the wall as early as 1922. Mr. Henry Ford saw it even earlier. They began the now familiar talk about the "economy of high wages," furnishing the worker with power to buy back what, with his declining assistance, the machine process could make. This movement never progressed much beyond talk, but it was the thin entering wedge. From a broader point of view, of course, the consumer is not without moral claims of his own. The output of modern industry rests on five fundamental factors: (1) Natural resources available; (2) skilled and unskilled labor (a declining factor but still very important); (3) technical management (an increasingly important factor); (4) non-human forms of energy (from coal; oil, water power); (5) the cultural heritage of the technical arts. If the consumer can find a job to aid production in factor 2, well and good; that gives him a direct if modest claim on the output, as has long been recognized. But increasingly he will be denied a job as technological unemployment gains. Either that, or the work demanded of him will be startlingly reduced by a shorter working week. In either case, toil will decline, and with it those claims founded on useful work. Technical management has a sound and growing claim on the output; but as there are probably not more than 200,000 families headed by active technicians in the United States, this is far too small a group to be of any appreciable help in carrying off the product. There are 30,000,000 families in the country. The other three factors--natural resources, energy, and the technical arts--are, or should be, the common inheritance of the whole community, which is the same as saying the common inheritance of the consumer. His common property provides the factors which are most important in the whole productive mechanism. He has, accordingly. from this broader point of view, a reasonably good moral right to the usufruct of his property. Now this may or may not be good moral doctrine; certainly economic realities are on the road to making it a practicable doctrine. To establish the right of the consumer to consume will take time--it may, indeed, take a revolution or two. But if I read the march of history aright, it will not be gainsaid. While history will undoubtedly solve this problem in her own brusque and hidden ways, it may not be out of place to speculate upon the methods which she may conceivably pursue. In the serried vanguard of the opposition which now blocks the free flow of consumption stand the private banking system and the debt structure. It is probable that both must be liquidated to a percentum of their present grandeur, a percentum which it would be rash to estimate, save for the reservation that it will be extremely small. The creation of money, the allotment of purchasing power, is a social function of the first importance and should be restored to the federal government, in whose hands the Constitution placed it. It is forever impossible for the private banker, working for private gain, adequately to finance the consumer. It wounds his moral sensibilities, for one thing. By reducing his time-honored toll and that of his stockholders, it would condemn itself to him as "unsound." If recent history does not demonstrate the incompatibility of private banking and effective consumption, mathematics can prove it readily. The consumer, therefore, cannot adequately consume until the private banker, as the chief executor of the nation's credit, is lifted gently but firmly out of the picture It is unfortunate that Mr. Roosevelt did not seize the unparalleled opportunity to lift him out, to the applause of a grateful nation, on March 4 last. The liquidation of the debt structure promises to be an even more drastic and shocking business. History may handle this problem by inflation, by devaluation of the dollar, by deliberate scaling down, by a hit or miss tumbling down, after the fashion of the walls of Jericho. It is to be noted, however, that the walls of Jericho were solid stone and mortar, not notes and paper. As for the methods whereby the consumer will ultimately be financed, history has a wide choice. She may select minimum subsistence payments per capita or per family; she may choose consumers' dividends, or a straight rationing of prime necessities, or an enormously shortened work week with undiminished wages--thus keeping all able-bodied consumers nominally employed; or a guaranteed job, more or less of a nominal character, in the public-works division; or a combination of these methods. Somehow, somewhere--but in the not too distant future--mass consumption must move up to the technical requirements of mass production, at the cost of whatever moralities and financial dream castles lie in the way. No realist will even consider retreating to the economy of the Middle Ages. Yet this retreat, painful and disorderly as it would be, is the sole alternative to deliberate and purposeful mass consumption. All men cannot at present work. All men must eat.
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