The widespread suffering from unemployment and want in this country today is a symptom of a fundamental maladjustment—a sickness, if you like, in our body economic. Almost every sickness can be cured, provided we get the right doctor to diagnose the case and prescribe the proper medicine, but the patient must take the medicine in order to get well. My plan is in essence a prescription for the relief and cure of the ailments from which our economic organization is today suffering. Of course, the inauguration of such a system of planned obsolescence will be opposed by many merely because it is new, for it is hard for us to abandon our old notions and adjust ourselves to a new way of thinking. Unlike most changes for the good of the masses, however, this scheme need not involve much hardship, strife or suffering. That is not necessary. With a reasonable amount of common sense used, the plan ought gradually to work smoothly without much loss to anybody. In war-time we conscript the flower of our country’s manhood, and send them to the front to fight and often be destroyed. If such drastic procedure is deemed wise and necessary in the crisis of war, would it not be far more logical and profitable in our present emergency to conscript the dead things—material, not human—such as obsolete buildings, machinery and outmoded commodities, and send them to the front to be destroyed in the war against depression, thus saving the country from economic chaos by providing work? It is far cheaper to destroy useless and obsolete goods now, and perhaps some of our synthetic wealth as well, than to risk destroying far more priceless assets, such as human life, and undermining the health and confidence of the people, by continuing to fight the depression with our old, slow and costly methods. Even in the present organization of our economic society, we recognize in many instances the necessity of destroying some of our wealth in order to increase it. For example, coal is wealth, but it is burned up and destroyed daily in locomotives, furnaces and other devices in order to create power to drive machinery and manufacture goods. Similarly, oil is wealth, but to serve its purpose it must be used and consumed in the engines of automobiles and the whirring wheels of factories. Grain is wealth, but we destroy it by feeding it to cattle, by consuming it ourselves, and by scattering it on the ground as seed to produce more grain. It is by this process that people live, function and create material goods. Wealth may be compared to our language. Although we use our language every day, it does not get used up. On the contrary, new words and idioms are constantly being added to the national vocabulary, and the language increases in usefulness the more it is spoken, instead of deteriorating.