NATIONAL WEALTH, INDIVIDUAL WEALTH, LUXURY AND ECONOMY.
It is a common theory with political economists, that national wealth is but the sum of individual wealth, and that as individual wealth increases, national wealth increases, pari passu.
We think this theory false and pernicious, and the more so because it is plausible.
All profit-bearing possessions or capital, tend to exonerate their owners from labor, and to throw the labor that supports society on a part only of its members. Now, as almost all wealth is the product of labor, this diminution of labor diminishes wealth, or, at least, increases poverty, by placing heavier burdens on the laboring class.
This, however, is a very small part of the evil effects of individual wealth. Society requires it of the rich to live according to their income, to fare sumptuously, to have costly dress, furniture, equipage, houses, &c., and to keep many servants.
Their incomes are spent in luxuries, and thousands of laborers are taken off from the production of necessaries to produce those luxuries, or to wait on their owners. Thus, the burden of the support of society, so far as the ordinary comforts and necessaries of life are concerned, are thrown on fewer and fewer, as private wealth and luxury increase. It requires a thousand pauper laborers to sustain one millionaire, and without them his capital will produce no profit. This accounts for the great numbers and excessive poverty of the mass in England. Half the boasted capital of England, probably two-thirds of it, is but a mortgage of the bones and sinews of the laborers, now and forever, to the capitalists. The national debt, stocks of all kinds, money at interest, and indeed all debts, represent this sort of private wealth, which is national poverty.
Sumptuous houses, parks, and all establishments that are costly to sustain and keep up, and do not facilitate, but check the production of necessaries, are also part of private wealth, and of national poverty. Four-fifths of the private wealth of England, and half of that of our Northeast, is a severe tax on labor, and a constant preventive of the accumulation of national wealth.
Private wealth at the South consists chiefly in negro laborers, and improvements of land, that increase its productive capacities. Fine enclosures, improved stock, good granaries, and machines and implements for farming, comfortable negro cabins, good orchards, &c., are as strictly a part of national, as of individual wealth. Not so with the costly private dwellings in our Northern cities. The expense of building, of repairing, of furnishing, and of keeping servants for their owners or tenants, is a constant drawback from productive industry, increases the burdens of the laboring poor, and diminishes national wealth. The poverty-stricken fields of New England are the necessary consequence of the luxurious expenditure in her cities. Yet that luxury is no part of national wealth, but a constant tax on it, whilst unproved farms constitute almost three-fourths of all her real wealth, for they feed and clothe mankind.
This is a most interesting subject; one which we have not mastered, or, if we had, this work on which we are engaged is not the proper one for its full discussion and exposition. We merely throw out a few suggestions for the consideration of the thinking and ingenuous. If we are right, luxury is the greatest sin against society; economy and industry, the chiefest of social virtues.