Skilled capital has a right to be waited on by skilled consumers, who will support it when it is right and punish it when it is wrong, by the way they buy and sell.
Skilled labor has a right to be waited on by skilled consumers, who will defend it from skilled capital that pretends to be skilled and is not.
True and sincere skilled capital and true and sincere skilled labor cannot keep on doing what they try to do as long as the supposedly skilled consumers they have a right to, back away from their job and lazily and foolishly buy and sell in the markets in such a way as to reward capital for doing wrong to labor, or labor for doing wrong to capital.
In other words, the second function of the skilled consumers after telling skilled capital and labor what they want to eat and wear, is to make arrangements to advertise to capital and labor and to have capital and labor advertise to them, so that they can be skilled in knowing how to help them work together, and skilled in buying in such a way as to help in making capital and labor more skilled instead of less in dealing with themselves and one another and with the people.
I have summed up the three Rights to Be Waited On. All of these rights turn on skilled advertising and on the science of being believed in, the science of being allowed to be autocrats, the science of being allowed by the people to make their democracy work.
I would like to illustrate this in the next chapter.
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III—THE RIGHT TO WHISPER
The employees in the stockyards in —— have been trying to get the attention of Mr. John Doe, the young man who inherited the business, to the fact that the least a family can live on now is $1388 a year.