From the viewpoint of all but convinced Socialists, this position is indefensible. We are asked to believe that the collective ownership and operation of the means of production would be more just and beneficial than the present plan of private ownership and operation. Yet the Socialist party refuses to tell us how the scheme would bring about these results; refuses to give us, even in outline, a picture of the machine at work. As reasonably might we be expected to turn the direction of industry over to a Rockefeller or a Morgan, making an act of faith in their efficiency and fairness. We are in the position of a man who should be advised to demolish an unsatisfactory house, without receiving any solid assurance that the proposed new one would be as good. To our requests for specific information about the working of the new industrial order the Socialists, as a rule, answer in terms of prophesied results. They leave us in the dark concerning the causes by which these wonderful results are to be produced. From the viewpoint of the confirmed Socialist, however, this failure to be specific is not at all unreasonable. He can have faith in the Socialist system without knowing beforehand how it will work. He believes in its efficacy because he believes that it is inevitable. In the words of Kautsky, "what is proved to be inevitable is proved not only to be possible, but to be the only possible outcome."[122] The Socialist believes that his scheme is inevitable because he thinks that it is necessarily included in the outcome of economic and social evolution. Neither the premises nor the conclusion of this reasoning is valid. The doctrines of economic determinism, the class struggle, the concentration of capital, the disappearance of the middle classes, the progressive pauperisation of the working classes, and all the other tenets of the Socialist philosophy, have been thoroughly discredited by the facts of psychology, the experience of the last half century, and the present trend of industrial and social forces.[123] Even if the Socialist outcome were inevitable, it would not necessarily be an improvement on the present system. It might illustrate the principle of retrogression.