“But there’s another kind of capital in the world, Jimmie. The Commies have attacked it—and they make sense attacking it, I say. It’s what you’d call ‘luck’ capital. Money people get by luck, by chance, outside of creative competition. Money made by the usurious employment of money. Money made by gambling. Money made on long-range, irresponsible deals. Buckets of money, inherited. Money made by a man who buys a piece of land to farm, and then has oil spout up on it. The American people are starting, right now, to discriminate between earned money and lucky money. That’s what the SEC rules governing stock markets are really all about. That’s why we’ve got these whacking inheritance taxes.
“An American laborer doesn’t begrudge the money a man makes by producing something worth-while or doing a valuable service. But he sure does begrudge the money a man swipes, or wins by a market bet, or has handed to him by his daddy for nothing, or finds on the ground because he happened to buy the Jones farm instead of the Smith acreage. The Commies try to confuse the two. They want no Capitalism. But I can see what the Americans really want. They want everybody paid, and paid as much as the traffic will bear, for what he, personally, contributes to America. And they want nobody to be able to get rich from doing nothing. Seems fair to me.”
“You think,” Jimmie asked, “they’re really figuring the future out like that?”
“I know it! Americans, Jimmie, are the coming people. They’re born squabblers—but they’re also hell-bent to get things right. Worst crime here is to be wrong, or to be a wrong guy. Right now, they know what the issue is, but they haven’t got the words for it. Neither have I. That is, not a slogan. People—wide-awake ones, a few business men included—go around saying that the country has taken a ‘social’ slant, and will never let go of it. Then they look scared because they think you’ll assume they’re Communists. But that’s all they mean. The kind of capital that keeps men on their toes can never be abolished. If some nitwitted mob of Reds puts an end to it, then the generations that come afterward will have to invent it all over. If Hitler wins, and we get the super race, state socialism, long-range planning by which the Germans will live on the fat, and those of us who haven’t got the guts to die will work away our lives for a slum bed and soup kitchen food, why—it’ll have to be invented again for the Germans.”
“After the Tausand Yahr Reich,” Jimmie said bitterly.
The old man’s eyes shone. “Thousand years? Horse manure! And God everlastingly damn the Germans, the Reds, the New Dealers, and every and any other group or individual that has gone solid-headed with the idea that you can plan a system for the generations to come! Seems to me the last twenty years have been spent in discussing the long-range ideas of self-appointed intellectuals and leaders. It’s a dumb American habit, by now. The Germans think they have a social system that’ll last for ten centuries. The Reds think they have something that’ll go on unchanged forever. But look how Fascism and Communism have changed already! The New Dealers are busy trying to figure out a perpetual system of their own. The Catholics and Protestants are trying, as they have tried for ages, to lay down an unchangeable gambit of religious law and moral code for the aeons ahead. Everybody, these days, is busy to pieces trying to impose his notions, his will, and his prejudices on the future. What a thing! Men pick their kids’ colleges before they’re born—and enter ’em there. People leave wills with instructions that presume to carry down to the forth and fifth generation! Every legislative body in the country is trying to decide, not what to do now, but what people as yet unborn ought to do! The political cockroaches won’t change themselves, but, boy! will they legislate for the people ahead! Remember what I said about time? It’s another time problem. The present is. Nobody knows what the future will be. Trying to estimate it and arrange it is not only dodging the screaming present, it’s a psychological statement of failure. Every son of Adam and daughter of Eve, who doesn’t like the way things are going these days, wants to set up some kind of pet new machinery that will change them in the days to come!”
“Some of those efforts are expressions of ideals, hopes—”
“Oh, sure.” Mr. Corinth ruffled his hair. “Look. About economic systems, debts, prejudices, religions, people’s wills—the whole kaboodle of orders which we intend to hand the future! The future always has ignored them and always will ignore them! Which any ass can see if he stops daydreaming. But that’s exactly what democracy was built to take care of! People think democracy is a system. An economic-social-political system. A thing that has books you can go back over and check. A thing with a code and a creed and laws. So that when a Hitler pops up, people go back to Jefferson or Washington to see what to do. God A’mighty! Did Washington or Jefferson ever run across Hitler? I lave we any direct information from those birds on what to do in case of a world-Fascism threat?
We have not! Quoting them today is pure medicine-man stuff—at least it can be, because they didn’t foresee these days and these problems. What they did foresee was that the people ought to have a continuing say-so in their government—and that’s all, so help me.”
Jimmie grinned. “Wish you’d tell that to my old man.”