With this economic creed we should see each individual doing his best work, and Society eagerly hastening to supply to each individual all that he needed to do his best work. As against this consummation devoutly to be wished stand our existing economic concepts:
(a) Men live by virtue of their own work.
(b) Men have to work in order to satisfy wants.
(c) The satisfaction of wants is the purpose of life.
(d) The advantage to the individual lies in his getting as much as he can, and doing as little as he can—in “buying cheap and selling dear.”
(e) The improvement of the individual lies in Society’s not giving him anything till he has shown that he has it already—or its equivalent in labour. Thus the less ability he has, the less of anything he gets—which improves him.
(f) All that a man produces is his own, and he has a right to consume it all himself, or destroy it—in any case, to withhold it from those who want it till they give him as much as he can get for it.
(g) All that a man consumes is pure advantage—the advantage of life. To have everything we want, to accumulate more than we want, to invent new wants with infinite pains and supply and oversupply them—this is happiness. And since we find practically that the few who do it are not happy, and that the many who cannot do it are not happy either, we assume an eternal appetite, and an eternal gratification in another world!
(Singular thing—the unsatisfied desires of Man! Trying to put a quart measure in a pint cup through an india-rubber eternity!)
(h) The advantage of the individual lying absolutely in his own hands, it is his obvious business to take care of himself; and since the pressure of social relation cannot be ignored, we assume that the business of society is simply to preserve “a fair field and no favour” for individuals to struggle in!