Mr. Hyndman, the celebrated English Socialist, attempts to say that such a thing is possible. In his manual of Socialism he asks us to believe that a man who has $50,000 would find it a very simple matter to live permanently by robbing other men of part of the products of their labor. This man, he tells us, merely buys a mill of some kind—doesn’t it matter what kind of a mill he buys?—employs a manager and the necessary number of operatives, and then sits down and lets the wheels go round. Don’t smile, John, for this is precisely what Mr. Hyndman tells us the man does. “He has nothing to do but sit still and watch the mill go,” he asserts, naively (see Mallock’s “Socialism,” p. 13).
Do you believe this? Socialists do. As a practical man, do you imagine that any one method of employing capital will be just as successful as any other? If the laborer produces all value, and an article is valuable simply because of the labor there is in it, Mr. Hyndman and his master, Karl Marx, and the soap-box orator, who is telling you how to solve all of life’s problems by voting for the candidates on the Socialist ticket, are right. If this is not true, they are wrong, and you can’t get away from this conclusion. One might as well argue that an engine is sufficient unto itself and needs neither working capital in the form of fuel nor the directing hand of the engineer.
There is another class of “capitalists” who receive comparatively little attention from the Socialists. These are the employers who make no profits upon their investment, who purchase material and pay their workers’ wages and who do not earn enough to reimburse themselves for their outlay. The commercial agencies which report business conditions have records of many such cases. Men go into business and fail; people put their money into stock companies and never receive dividends. The work is done; the labor is performed; but there is no surplus value of which the worker may be “robbed.” In this case are we to assume that the unfortunate investors are robbed by their workmen?
Marx maintains that all capitalists are robbers. Are we therefore to believe that all capitalists are successful? We cannot deny that capital, and even the product of labor, may be transferred by the process of robbery. Before there can be any robbery, however, the capital or the value of the product must exist, and it is beyond the power of labor to call either capital or value into being.
CHAPTER V
YOUR OWN PAY ENVELOPE
My dear Smith,
Having seen that the Marxian theories of value are not the sanely “scientific” laws that Socialists declare them to be, but are utter absurdities that run counter to all laws of logic and even contradict human experience, we shall now get down to your own individual pay envelope, for that is the thing which most interests you. But, please don’t imagine that, because we have stopped talking about Marx’s theories for the moment, we have reached the end of our list of Socialist fallacies. To tell the truth, we have just begun to enumerate them. Silly as these ideas are in theory, they do not begin to attain the full limit of their absurdity until we attempt to apply them to the practical affairs of life.
Last night I stood at the street corner and heard the soap-box orator “educate” the crowd. He told them that the average earnings of every worker in America was $2,500 a year—a trifle more than $48 a week—and he asked the men if they had found any such sum of money in their pay-envelope recently.
You can imagine the answer he received to this question, John. Yet, the soap-boxer still asserted that this was the amount each worker had earned, and insisted that the difference between $48 and the sum he had received represented the amount of which his employer was “robbing” him. From the look on the faces of some of the men, I felt that the agitator had made an impression upon them. He reeled off his statistics so glibly that you really couldn’t blame them for believing him.
Of course, he also told them that, under Socialism, nothing of this kind could happen—that they would get their $2,500 a year, and more, too, and that they would have to work only half as long a time each day in order to earn this amount of money. “We must change the ‘system,’” he cried. “We must stop the making of goods for profit! Then, and then only, will you put an end to the exploitation that is the cause of all your poverty and misery. It is the only way you can throw the parasite-capitalist off your back. You are being robbed of four-fifths of your wages, and you’re not allowed to keep even the little you get, because capitalism, after robbing you by taking four-fifths of the money you earn, puts the prices of everything you buy higher and higher until there isn’t a penny of your earnings left for yourself, and you don’t get a chance to live decently, at that.”