So far, every business man will agree; in fact, this is the doctrine they hammered into your head during the Coolidge campaign, and it got them seven million plurality. All right, then; and now let us suppose, just for the sake of arguing, that the Coolidge administration believed in allowing the rich to charge as high prices as they pleased for goods, and to break strikes and beat down the wages of the poor; what would happen then? Why, obviously the poor wouldn’t have the money to buy so much goods or to furnish so much profits for the bosses; it would be only the rich who had the money, and goods would be more and more for the rich, and less and less for the poor. Take notice, Judd, the Secretary of the Treasury estimated that in 1919 the amount spent for luxuries in our country was $22,700,000,000—and with millions of families lacking bread!
But with the flood of goods pouring out from the machines, the rich find it harder and harder to consume the product; they take to reinvesting their money, that is, using it to make more machines, to turn out more goods, to be sold for more profits. But already there are more goods than can be sold; there are no longer enough profits to supply the demands of the great mass of heaped-up capital. So comes a glut of goods, and factories have to shut down, and we have “hard times.” Just what are “hard times,” Judd? Paste this in your hat now:
Hard times are tenant farmers starving because they have raised too much food!
And again:
Hard times are weavers in rags, because they have made too much clothing!
And again:
Hard times are carpenters homeless, because they have built too many houses!
And finally:
Hard times are workingmen who have finished making the world for their masters, and are ordered to move on to some other planet!
You will say, Judd, that such absurd things could never happen. To that I answer, very simply: