“When a man is big enough—or his job is big enough—” Jones argued, “he arises above the ordinary law of supply and demand. In fact, in a sense, he controls supply and demand. He puts himself in the job and dictates the salary. You have a perfect right to pay yourself what other men in similar positions are getting. Besides, as I said, you’ll have to do so for the credit of the firm. Do you call a doctor who lives in a tumble-down tenement? You do not. You call one from a fine home; you select him for his appearance of prosperity, regardless of the fact that he may have mortgaged his future to create that appearance, and of the further fact that he will charge you a fee calculated to help pay off the mortgage. When you want a lawyer, do you seek some garret practitioner? You do not. You go to a big building, with a big name plate”—the pugnacious moustache gave hint of a smile gathering beneath—“and you pay a big price for a man with an office full of imposing-looking books, not a tenth part of which he has ever read, or intends ever to read. I admit there’s a good deal of bunco in the game, but if you sit in you’ve got to play it that way, or the dear public will throw you into the discard. Many a man who votes himself a salary in five figures—or gets a friendly board of directors to do it for him—if thrown unfriended between the millstones of supply and demand probably couldn’t qualify for your modest hundred dollars a month and board. But he has risen into a different world; instead of being dictated to, he dictates. That is your position, Grant. Look at it sensibly.”
“Nevertheless, I shall get along on two hundred a month. If I find it necessary in order to protect the interests of the business to take a membership in an expensive club, or commit any other extravagance, I shall do so, and charge it up as a business expense. Besides, I think I can be happier that way.”
“And in the meantime your business is piling up profits. What are you going to do with them? Give them away?”
“No. That, too, is immoral—whether it be a quarter to a beggar or a library to a city. It feeds the desire to get money without earning it, which is the most immoral of all our desires. I have not yet decided what I shall do with it. I have hired an expert, in you, to show me how to make money. I shall probably find it necessary to hire another to show me how to dispose of it. But not a dollar will be given away.”
“And so you would let the beggar starve? That’s a new kind of altruism.”
“No. I would correct the conditions that made him a beggar. That’s the only kind of altruism that will make him something better than a beggar.”
“Some people would beg in any case, Grant. They are incapable of anything better.”
“Then they are defectives, and should be cared for by the State.”
“Then the State may practise charity—”
“It is not charity; it is the discharge of an obligation. A father may support his children, but he must not let anyone else do it.”