The world is sadly muddled. Millions pay for this muddling with their lives; tens of millions pay with bitter suffering. The owners have had their day. The opportunity for the producers has well-nigh come.
The men and women who are responsible for the work that is involved in the economic reorganization of the world must see the whole plan as well as the multiplicity of detail, and must work with the whole plan vividly before their eyes if they are not to be blinded and led astray by the multitude of will-o'-the-wisps that flit across the path.
IV. ECONOMIC SELF-GOVERNMENT
Economic society consists of unit groups or organs which are established for the performance of certain functions. Mines and other extractive units take nature's stores from their age-old resting place and prepare them for the railroad, the factory or the home; the transport units convey goods and people; the merchandising units bring together many varieties of goods, and act as a distributing agency for those who will consume the products of mine and factory. The existence of a unit of economic organization is therefore a proof of the presence of some economic function. The whole structure of economic society has developed in response to the economic needs and in accordance with the economic activities of the community in which it exists.
When a part of the economic structure is built, it is expected to function. Mines, when opened, must produce coal; railroads, when completed, must provide transportation. Side by side with the problems involved in the kind of groupings that make up economic society, there is the question of the handling and direction of these groups. No economic institution is of value unless it will perform some useful service by turning out an economic good or by affording a benefit that corresponds to some human need.
Each rational person, and every self-directing social group seeks to get the largest possible return in the form of satisfaction for the time and the energy invested in any given enterprise. This law of maximum advantage—which applies with double force to social enterprises, underlies all intelligently directed effort.
Unintelligent effort concerns itself with the principle of minimum outlay—seeking to ascertain the least possible expenditure of energy that will yield a subsistence. This is one of the essential distinctions between the present day society and most of those that have proceeded it. Likewise it is the difference between the more and the less highly civilized portions of the earth at the present time. The individual or the group—operating on a very narrow margin, or on a deficit that involves constant misery and that may at any time spell disaster, tends to slip by with the least possible misery or suffering, or, to put it more technically, tends to expend the least possible amount of energy that is required for survival. The moment the tables are turned, and the individual or the group operates on a surplus which permits the enjoyment of more than the bare necessaries, the law of minimum outlay is supplanted by the law of maximum returns.
The truth of this principle is strikingly illustrated in Canada, Australia, Argentina, and other relatively new societies where resources are abundant and surplus is large. The same men and women who, under European conditions of narrow marginal living, were satisfied to survive with the least possible expenditure of effort, are transformed into creatures operating on another economic plane. In these new and fertile countries, where the individual, and indeed, the entire group is able to live above the line of bare subsistence, and where surplus is so easily accumulated, the individual devotes himself untiringly to the economic struggle. It is not because they are poor, but because they have a chance to get rich that these people are willing to expend unusual effort.