Waste of capital owing to bankruptcy, to working at irregular efficiency, to frequent change of dimension, to cost of "getting the market," to cross freights, to anarchy of distribution, to loss of by-products;
Waste of human energy in the work of competition; and above all in unemployment leading to vagrancy and pauperism.
And we need produce no testimony to prove things so obvious as the immorality, injustice, and cruelty of overemployment and unemployment and the necessary results thereof: drunkenness, disease, pauperism, prostitution, insanity, and crime.
One word only still needs explanation: It has been stated that this immorality, injustice, and cruelty are "unnecessary." It is useless to rail at these things if they are necessary. Nature is often immoral, unjust and cruel. The survival of the few fit and the corresponding sacrifice of the many unfit has no justification in morality. Death, deformity, and disease are often both unjust and cruel. Yet against these last we are in great part helpless. It is not enough to show that the competitive system results in evil; we have to demonstrate that these evils are avoidable; and that our remedy for them will not involve still greater evils. This belongs to the final chapters on Socialism; and is referred to here only to assure the reader that it has not been overlooked.
Sufficient emphasis, however, has not yet been put upon the lack of order that characterizes the competitive system.
FOOTNOTES:
[65] "A Plea for Liberty," p. 17:
"Under our existing voluntary coöperation with its free contracts and its competition, production and distribution need no official oversight. Demand and supply, and the desire of each man to gain a living by supplying the needs of his fellows, spontaneously evolve that wonderful system whereby a great city has its food daily brought round to all doors or stored at adjacent shops; has clothing for its citizens everywhere at hand in multitudinous varieties; has its houses and furniture and fuel ready made or stocked in each locality; and has mental pabulum from halfpenny papers, hourly hawked round, to weekly shoals of novels, and less abundant books of instruction, furnished without stint for small payments. And throughout the kingdom, production as well as distribution is similarly carried on with the smallest amount of superintendence which proves efficient; while the quantities of the numerous commodities required daily in each locality are adjusted without any other agency than the pursuit of profit."
[66] Report of the Industrial Commission, pp. 829-831, Vol. I, 1900.