Economic development -- Social aspects; Social evolution; Social problems; Work
So every developing society raises its specially rich individuals who do
not produce. They, in the increase of their inordinate consumption,
demand more and more service from their fellows, till, instead of one
healthy human creature easily producing more wealth than he can consume,
we have this spot of local disease consuming more and more of the labour
of other people, thus depraving more and more of the substance of
Society. All these caterers to abnormal appetites cease to be producers
in a healthy sense; they do not add to the well-being of Society by
legitimate products for social distribution, but add to the ill-being of
Society by unhealthy secretions centered in one spot.
If the production of this mass of workers abnormally localised is in
itself legitimate; that is, if the “employer,” _i. e._, the consumer,
consumes only useful and beautiful things, even so the effect is
injurious if he consumes too much; it is still local congestion, though
of healthy blood; but that position is intrinsically untenable. No
leisure class ever contented itself with really useful and beautiful
things. You do not make a Vitellius on wholesome food. Consumption,
pursued as an end, naturally develops into morbid excess, and the
caterers to it must produce unhealthfully. This is the hole in the
“furnishing employment” theory.
It is not being employed that benefits a man. If I pay a man a hundred
dollars a day to sit in one spot and twirl his thumbs, or to climb up
and down one post continually, I am not benefiting him, I am injuring
him. If I subtract a human being from social service and add him to my
private service I degrade him, unless I do more work by virtue of his
service. Here is the law of private service:
A human being is entitled to as many servants as he can do the work of
better.
That is, if two men, working separately, can produce to a certain amount
each, but if the two, combining, one serving the other, can then produce
through the one served more than the previous amount of the product of
both, that is a legitimate social relation. For the doctor to have a
helper to take care of and drive his horse enables him to do more and
better doctoring; he can justify his having a servant. But for the
doctor to “employ” a driver, a footman, a page, two outriders, and a
herald, would not add to his efficiency as a doctor; that would be an
illegitimate relation.
The overconsuming rich do mischief first in withholding from the social
circulation an undue amount of social products, as a mere miser—social
congestion; second, by withdrawing from the social service an undue
amount of labour for their own aggrandisement—a social excrescence; and
third, by _perverting the product_ of their private commando of workers,
generating unhealthy secretions in the body politic—a social disease.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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