The truth about socialism

by Allan L. Benson

It is flying in the face of evolution itself to talk about destroying, or even effectually regulating the trusts.

Private monopolies cannot be destroyed except as green apples can be destroyed—by crushing them and staying the evolutionary processes that, if left alone, will yield good fruit.

Private monopolies cannot be effectually regulated because, so long as they are permitted to exist, they will regulate the government instead of permitting the government to regulate them. They will regulate the government because the great profits at stake will give them the incentive to do so and the enormous capital at their command will give them the power to do so.

In other words, Socialists say that the processes of evolution should go on. What do they mean by this? They mean that the good elements of the trust principle should be preserved and the bad elements destroyed. What are the good elements? The economies of large, well-ordered production, and the avoidance of the waste due to haphazard, competitive production. And the bad elements? The powers that private monopoly gives, through control of market and governmental policies, to rob the consumer.

Socialists contend that the good can be saved and the bad destroyed by converting the private monopolies into public monopolies—in other words, by letting the government own the trusts and the people own the government. This may seem like what the foes of Socialism would call a “patent nostrum.” It is nothing of the kind. It is no more a patent nostrum than the trusts are patent nostrums. Socialists invented neither private monopolies nor public monopolies. Socialists did not kill competition. Competition killed itself. Socialists simply were able to foresee that too much competition would end all competition and thus give birth to private monopoly.

And, having seen thus far, they looked a little further and saw that private monopoly would not be an unmixed blessing. They saw that under it, robbery would be practised in new, strange and colossal forms. They knew the people would not like robbery in any form. They knew they would cry out against it as they are crying out against the trusts to-day. And they believed that after having tried to destroy the trusts and failed at that; after having tried to regulate the trusts and failed at that, that the people would cease trying to buck evolution, and get for themselves the benefits of the trusts by owning them.

This may be an absurd idea, but in part, at least, it has already been verified. It has been demonstrated that private monopoly saves the enormous sums that were spent in the competitive era to determine whether this man or that man should get the profit upon the things you buy. The consumer has absolutely no interest in the identity of the capitalist who exploits him. But when capitalists were competing for trade, the consumer was made to bear the whole cost of fighting for his trade.

Private monopoly has largely done away with the cost of selling trust goods, by doing away with the individual competitors who were once struggling to put their goods upon the market. Private monopoly has also reduced the cost of production by introducing the innumerable economies that accompany large production.

What private monopoly has not done and will never do is to pass along these savings to the consumers. The monopolists have passed along some of the savings, but not many of them. What they have passed along bears but a small proportion to what they have kept. That is what most of the trouble is about now. The people find it increasingly difficult to live. For a dozen years, it has been increasingly difficult to live. Persistent and more persistent has been the demand that something be done about the trusts.

The first demand was that the trusts be destroyed. Now, Mr. Bryan is about the only man in the country to whom the conviction has not been borne home that the trusts cannot be destroyed. The rest of the people want the trusts regulated, and the worst of the trust magnates sent to jail. Up to date, not a single trust has been regulated, nor a single trust magnate sent to jail. Officially, of course, the Standard Oil Company, the American Tobacco Company and the Coal Trust have been cleansed in the blue waters of the Supreme Court laundry and hung upon the line as white as snow. But gentlemen who are not stone blind know that this is not so. They know the Standard Oil Company, the American Tobacco Company and the Coal Trust have merely put on masks and gone on with the hold-up business. Therefore, the Socialist predictions of seventy years ago have all been verified up to and including the inability of any government either to destroy or regulate the trusts.