Confiscations; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
An individual can be forced to submit to any kind of terms when his
necessities are driving him. When those necessities are satisfied he
must stop and let development go, for he cannot stand the terms. He is
willing to go ahead, but he simply finds his physical being unequal to
the task. As it is with one individual so it is with a nation of
individuals. They also can be forced to submit to any kind of terms when
their necessities are driving them, and when their necessities are
supplied they too must stop and let development go, for they cannot
stand the terms. In other words, the capacity of people, singly or
collectively, is limited, and if they are compelled to exhaust that
capacity in supporting millionaire parasites at home, and paying for
their extravagance abroad, they cannot improve themselves or develop
their country.
Complicity, then, and negligence on the part of our law makers has made
a few men the absolute owners of the financial or money branch of our
economics, and the people find it impossible to move except when these
masters find it to their interests to let them.
Progress under such conditions will never be more than a dream.
We could find use for all the capital that is now in the country, and
all that has been and is being taken out of it, but we should first
loosen the grip of these legalized despoilers and see how far what we
have got would go before we talk of issuing more, which would soon turn
up missing like the rest.
XIII.
We hear much about what we are losing by the balance of trade being
against us, but not a word about that other floodgate through which our
capital is rushing, namely, our millionaire class making its purchases
abroad, and their other expenses while living among the foreign birds of
a like feather. Their idle money is left here for investment. They do
not look to that quarter for income. The world over there is under the
feet of a few as it is here, and the result is the same - idle money
looking for interest.
No less an authority than the late Ward McAllister has said that up to
last year two hundred and eighty American women had married foreign
titles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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