“I too will go to work!” cries the uneasy Crœsus. “I will not sit here and live on the wealth made by others!” But all cry out against him. “Stop! Go back! You ‘do not have to work’! Work is only to get money, and you have got it; be satisfied and leave the field to us! If you work for nothing you lower the scale of wages! If you work at ‘union rates’ you rob some poor man of the job!”
Hemmed in by these theories there is nothing for the rich man to do but to keep on working for even more money, which is commonly allowed to be excusable if not commendable, or to go and play. The true “Leisure Class” only plays. Their playthings cost much money, but as this money goes back to those who make the plaything they justify themselves by the “furnishing employment” theory. This is a very old fallacy, and impossible to refute while we believe that work is a thing done to get wealth, and that wealth may be legitimately “owned” to an indefinite amount by individuals.
As Society increases in productivity wealth increases, and by our arbitrary apportionment it increases in the hands of individuals—it has to. These individuals holding all the goods and other people needing the goods, yet the Pay theory—no goods except for previous work—acting sharply here, the only legitimate method of distributing these individual congestions of wealth is by “employing” as many as possible. And as we do not consider the work as the important part of the exchange, but the pay, so we do not care at what the beneficiary is employed, so long as he is paid.
What we call “furnishing employment” we really esteem as “furnishing Payment,”—looking at the good, the real good in question, to be the holder of many things, making it possible for the worker to also get things,—the “Pleasure-in-Impression” theory acting with the Want theory and the Pay theory.
So every developing society raises its specially rich individuals who do not produce. They, in the increase of their inordinate consumption, demand more and more service from their fellows, till, instead of one healthy human creature easily producing more wealth than he can consume, we have this spot of local disease consuming more and more of the labour of other people, thus depraving more and more of the substance of Society. All these caterers to abnormal appetites cease to be producers in a healthy sense; they do not add to the well-being of Society by legitimate products for social distribution, but add to the ill-being of Society by unhealthy secretions centered in one spot.
If the production of this mass of workers abnormally localised is in itself legitimate; that is, if the “employer,” i. e., the consumer, consumes only useful and beautiful things, even so the effect is injurious if he consumes too much; it is still local congestion, though of healthy blood; but that position is intrinsically untenable. No leisure class ever contented itself with really useful and beautiful things. You do not make a Vitellius on wholesome food. Consumption, pursued as an end, naturally develops into morbid excess, and the caterers to it must produce unhealthfully. This is the hole in the “furnishing employment” theory.
It is not being employed that benefits a man. If I pay a man a hundred dollars a day to sit in one spot and twirl his thumbs, or to climb up and down one post continually, I am not benefiting him, I am injuring him. If I subtract a human being from social service and add him to my private service I degrade him, unless I do more work by virtue of his service. Here is the law of private service:
A human being is entitled to as many servants as he can do the work of better.
That is, if two men, working separately, can produce to a certain amount each, but if the two, combining, one serving the other, can then produce through the one served more than the previous amount of the product of both, that is a legitimate social relation. For the doctor to have a helper to take care of and drive his horse enables him to do more and better doctoring; he can justify his having a servant. But for the doctor to “employ” a driver, a footman, a page, two outriders, and a herald, would not add to his efficiency as a doctor; that would be an illegitimate relation.
The overconsuming rich do mischief first in withholding from the social circulation an undue amount of social products, as a mere miser—social congestion; second, by withdrawing from the social service an undue amount of labour for their own aggrandisement—a social excrescence; and third, by perverting the product of their private commando of workers, generating unhealthy secretions in the body politic—a social disease.