From this follows the costs of insurance, and the whole insurance industry, which is inevitable under the profit system, but is entire waste so far as true production is concerned. Big enterprises like the Steel Trust do not carry insurance, and neither does the United States Postoffice. They are wealthy enough to stand their own losses. A national co-operative enterprise would be in the same position, and the whole business of collecting money for insurance and keeping records and carrying on lawsuits would be forgotten.
Next, advertising. It would be no exaggeration to say that seventy per cent of the material published in American newspapers and magazines today is pure waste; and therefore seventy per cent of the labor of all the people who cut down forests and manufacture and transport paper and set up type and print and distribute publications is wasted. There is, of course, a small percentage of advertising that is useful, but most of it is boasting and falsehood, and even where it tells the truth it simply represents the effort of a merchant to persuade you to buy in his store instead of in a rival store—an achievement which is profitable to the merchant, but utterly useless to society as a whole.
This same statement applies to all traveling salesmen, and to a great percentage of middlemen. It applies also to a great part of delivery service. If you live in a crowded part of any city, you see a dozen milk wagons pass your door every morning, doing the work which could be done exactly as well by one. That is only one case out of a thousand I might name.
Next, crime. I have already discussed the crime of arson, and I might discuss the crimes of pocket-picking, burglary, forgery, and a hundred others in the same way. I am aware of the fact that there may be a few born criminals; there may be a few congenital cheats, whom we should have to put in hospitals. But we have only to consult the crime records, during the war and after the war, in order to see that when jobs are hunting men there are few criminals, and when men are hunting jobs there are many criminals. I have no figures as to the cost of administering justice in the United States—policemen, courts and jails—but it must be hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
I have discussed at great length the suppression of the productive power of society. I should not fail to mention the suppression of the inventive power of society, a factor less obvious, but probably in the long run even greater. Every one familiar with the inside of a big industry knows that hundreds and even thousands of useful processes are entirely suppressed, because it would not pay one particular concern to stand the expense of the changes involved. You know how, during the war, our government brought all the makers of engines together and perfected in triumph a "Liberty motor." But now we have gone back to private interest and competition, and each concern is jealously engaged in guarding its own secrets, and depriving industry as a whole of the benefit of everything that it learns. Each is spying upon the others, stealing the secrets of the others, stealing likewise from those who invent new ideas—and thus discouraging them from inventing any more.
I use this word "discourage," and I might write a chapter upon it. What human imagination can conceive the amount of social energy that is lost because of the factor of discouragement, directly caused by the competitive method? Who can figure what it means to human society that a great percentage of the people in it should be haunted by fear of one sort or another—the poor in fear of unemployment, sickness and starvation, the little business man in fear of bankruptcy and suicide, the big business man in fear of hard times and treachery of his competitors, the idle rich in fear of robbery and blackmail, and the whole community in fear of foreign war and domestic tumult!
Anyone might go on and elaborate these factors that I have named, and think of scores of others. Anyone familiar with business life or with industrial processes would be able to put his finger on this or that enormous saving which he would be able to make if he and all his rivals could combine and come to an agreement. This has been proven over and over again in large-scale industry; it is the fact which has made of large-scale industry an overwhelming power, sucking all the profits to itself, reaching out and taking in new fields of human activity, and setting at naught all popular clamor and even legal terrors. How can anyone, seeing these facts, bring himself to deny that if we did systematize production and make it one enterprise, precisely adapted to one end, we should enormously increase the results of human labor, and the benefit to all who do the world's work?
A good deal of this waste we can stop when we get ready, and other parts of it our bountiful mother nature will replace. When in a world war we kill some ten or twenty millions of the flower of our young manhood, we have only to wait several generations, and our race will be as good as ever. But, on the other hand, there is some waste that can never be repaired, and this is the thing truly frightful to contemplate. When we dig the iron ore out of the bowels of the earth and rust it away in wars, we are doing something our race can never undo. And the same is true of many of our precious substances: phosphorus, sulphur, potash. When we cut down the forests from our mountain slopes, and lay bare the earth, we not merely cause floods and washouts, and silt up our harbors, we take away from the surface of our land the precious life-giving soil, and make a habitable land into a desert, which no irrigating and reforesting can ever completely restore. The Chinese have done that for many centuries, and we are following in their footsteps; more than six hundred million wagon-loads of our best soil are washed down to the sea every year! If you wish to know about these matters, I send you to a book, "On Board the Good Ship Earth," by Herbert Quick. It is one of the most heart-breaking books you ever read, yet it is merely a quiet statement of the facts about our present commercial anarchy.
CHAPTER LXIII
SOCIALISM AND SYNDICALISM
(Discusses the idea of the management of industry by the state, and the idea of its management by the trade unions.)