Your pay envelope

by John Richard Meader

Yet, this is precisely what the Socialists do when they commence to quote “facts.” It is useless for them to deny the charge, for there is no other method by which they can figure an average earning capacity of $2,500 for each worker. To do this it would be necessary for the employer to get his cotton for nothing, his leather for nothing, and everything he uses in making his product, for nothing. Moreover, it presupposes that he can procure free fuel, free light, and, what is still more improbable, that he has to pay nothing for new machinery or for repairing the old. Do you think that the Socialist is showing himself the “friend” of the worker when he fills his mind with such “dope” as this?

And, even, the figures we have worked out are not fair—to the employer. He does not make a profit of more than $299 upon the labor of each of his workers—not by any means! Out of the $299 must come the cost of selling and transportation, bad debts, taxes, interest, etc., so that, when we have deducted all these charges, we can scarcely question Willey’s justification for the assertion (“Laborer and the Capitalist,” p. 22) that capital actually receives no more than 6 per cent net profits on its product. Moreover, as The American Federationist points out (July, 1905), the census figures fall short of giving us the actual cost of manufactures, as the original “gross value” upon which our calculations are based is itself “arrived at by a constant duplication of value, owing to the fact that the finished products of one plant become the material of some other factory, in which they are changed into some higher form and again included in the value of products.”

I will admit that it is practically impossible to compile statistics that will take such facts as these into consideration, and the Socialists do not act fairly when they lead us to assume that all these conditions have been considered in their figures. How many times do you suppose the value of the same piece of leather is computed from the time it becomes a hide until it is turned out, a finished product, from the shoe factory. Yet, as we have seen, every time the value of this material is included in the value of products it gives the manufacturer credit for a sum of money that never reached him.

Let us suppose that we were running all our industries under just such a collective form of government as the Socialists propose to establish, and that, as a result, we were bound to see that every worker got the $5,000 a year he has been promised. Do you see what that would mean? Figure it out for yourself—multiply the 7,405,513 workers in the industrial plants by the $5,000 that each would have to be paid, and then remember that the seven millions of workers represent only a small proportion of the workers to whom this sum of money must be given by the Co-operative Commonwealth. Even counting the seven millions alone, we have a total of $37,027,505,000—almost twice as much as the “gross value” of all manufactured products in this country to-day.

It is true that we do not know just how many men, women and children of working age there are who would have to be given a place in the collective pay-roll. In view of the total population of the United States, I do not think that any Socialist will accuse me of overstating the case if I assert that there would be 30,000,000 people to be provided for.

What would this mean? Merely an annual pay-roll of $150,000,000,000—that’s all.

Easy, isn’t it! At present, we manufacture less than $21,000,000,000 worth of goods—the consumable wealth produced in the United States is estimated by Socialists to be but $30,000,000,000 (Appeal to Reason, October 5, 1912); yet they ask us to get busy and undertake to meet a pay-roll that is at least fully five times greater than the total product to-day. And, if you want to be as conservative as the most conservative Socialist statistician who is dreaming these dreams, and allow that labor under Socialism will be rewarded with a meagre $2,000 a year, you will still have a pay-roll of $60,000,000,000 to provide for, or twice as much as we make. How are you going to meet it? As a practical man, John, I ask you: How? Certainly not from the $21,000,000,000 produced each year in manufactures. If we add to this the total wealth represented by the agricultural, mining and fishing interests of this country, we shall still fall far short of the sum we require. How is it to be done?

Absurd as all these promises are, we have not yet reached the limit—far from it! For example, we are told that in the Co-operative Commonwealth we shall have to work only half as long as we do now. In other words, the man who works eight hours a day now, will get along swimmingly by working four hours, and still receive the income promised—from $2,000 to $5,000 a year—for his effort.

Are we to understand from this that, though the worker, with the best machinery and the most scientific management now possible, succeeds only in turning out less than $900 worth of goods in a year, he will be able, under collective management, to turn out from two and one-half to five times as great a product, while working just half as many hours?

You know that this couldn’t be done. You know that, if you worked half as many hours as you do now, some other man would have to put in the other half of the day or only about half the usual product would be manufactured. If, therefore, we entirely disregard the fact that Socialists are promising to pay the individual worker more money every year than several workers are now able to produce, we are still confronted by a problem that defies solution. A certain amount of work must be done to keep the needs of Society supplied. To do this work, a certain amount of effort must be exerted, and, to exert this effort, a certain amount of time is necessary. Yet, the Socialists want us to assume that all of these appeals to common sense are absurd—that once the making of goods for profit has ceased, there will be no difficulty in meeting the industrial pay-roll, no matter how enormously its proportions may have increased.