The COMING AGE of
ny
“ROSPERITY
AVE you ever been in a home
where an overindulged and
pampered child took upon his
plate more than he could eat?
Well, our modern civilization
is just like that. Governments
are just large families made up of many
small families. In these governments
we have overindulged and pampered
children, too. These men and women
have more than they can eat or use,
while their neighbors are begging for the
very existence of their lives. Most of
us would not tolerate the pampered
child who piles upon his plate all the
cake and pie that is on the table. We
would take immediate measures to
correct his abuses. Perhaps the reason
that we do not correct the abuses of
wealth heaped up by a few in our present
day is because we too are all actuated by
the same spirit of selfishness, and would
take all the pie and cake if we only had
a chance.
Very few of us really have the Chris-
tian spirit of unselfishness, of sharing
our prosperity with our neighbors.
We like to keep all the good things for
ourselves, although we may have more
than we can eat or use. We console
ourselves that we gave a few dollars
to some charity or church work last
week, or that the other fellow has just
as good a chance to get something in
this life as we have. We make long
speeches and wordy prayers, but “if a
brother or sister be naked, and destitute
of daily food, and one of you say unto
them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed
and filled; notwithstanding ye give them
not those things which are needful to
the body; what doth it profit?” James
2:18, 16.
CAUSED BY SELFISHNESS
(Because of man’s selfishness we are
undergoing the most serious depression
this world has ever known. But, you
say, we have had depressions before.
Most certainly we have. And every one
had selfishness for its basic cause.
Permanent prosperity has never been
possible under the conditions in which
man has been living, and the world will
never know permanent prosperity until
PAGE TWELVE
What Will Bring It P
How Will It Come
By
L. ERVIN
WRIGHT
we solve the distribution of the cake
and the pie, the distribution of wealth,
in other words. So long as our grown-up
children pile up on their plates more
than they can eat or use to the malnutri-
tion of the other grown-up children
around our table of civilization, we
shall always live in dread of poverty,
depression, and starvation.
Starvation has stared people in the
face in times past, but the reason has
been that there has been a lack of the
foodstuffs of life. Today we have a
unique situation—a situation unheard of
since time began. Starvation faces
Americans in a land where there is an
oversupply of the foodstuffs of life.
We are wearing cast-off clothing, be-
cause the country is oversupplied with
clothing! What an anomaly!
IronicAL PicTURE
One modern writer puts our present
situation this way: “In our society
the means of production are in the hands
of great privately owned corporations,
and the mass of our people are de-
pendent upon these both for the pro-
ducts they buy and the wages with
which the buying is done. We have
invented a whole complex of machinery
which enables us to produce three or
four times as much of every kind of
goods as we need; or rather, to be
precise, as the total wage fund will buy.
“The effect of this is to stop pro-
duction until the surplus has been sold;
for ours is a ‘profit system,” and unless
goods can be sold at a profit they are
not made available for use. The result
of this is a condition where a large
percentage of our people are out of em-
ployment. They have not the money to
buy the goods, and therefore the goods
must stay in the warehouses. The
factories must be idle, and everyone
must wait until the few who have
money have used up the surplus sup-
plies of food and clothing.
“The condition is one which can never
get any better; on the contrary, it gets
worse with every new invention. Every
man who finds out how to make more
goods with less labor renders a certain
number of our population superfluous.
They can wait around and slowly
starve, or they can be considerate of
their neighbors and take themselves
out of the way at once.
Rapbicar SoruTtion
@Q “Now then, along comes the radical
thinker and examines the situation, and,
through some strange kink in his mind,
he does not find it obvious that men
should be starving to death because
they have produced too much food, or
that they should be wearing rags be-
cause they have produced too much
clothing. It seems to him that the evi
arises from the fact of private ownership,
and production from the profit of
private owners. He says that if in-
dustries were publicly owned, then each
worker would receive the full value of
his product, and would be able to buy
the equivalent of what he produces.
Thus consumption would equal produc-
tion, and the factories could go on
working and turning out plenty for
everyone. If they stopped, the worker
would not be out of a job, he would be on
a vacation.
“The difference between unemploy-
ment and vacation is understood by
every worker—in the latter case your
pay continues, while in the former it
stops.
“This is the ‘radical’ solution of our
social problem, and you can see at once
why it is dangerous and alarming: it
threatens the interest of the private
owner; and this private ownership in-
cludes newspapers, and magazines, and
radio, and moving pictures, as well as
most books, and colleges, and churches.
THE WATCHMAN MAGAZINE