Rural Wealth and Welfare: Economic Principles Illustrated and Applied in Farm LifeFairchild, Geo. T. (George Thompson)
Science
Rural Wealth and Welfare: Economic Principles Illustrated and Applied in Farm Life
Fairchild, Geo. T. (George Thompson)
Agriculture -- Economic aspects; Economics
The power of one combination to
interfere with the workings of another by indirect methods, like
investment in the other’s stock, is an evil to be treated like any fraud.
Laws and courts are in the power of the people, and should preserve the
rights of all.
One great danger of large combinations is the tendency to govern by iron
rule instead of by fair judgment of individual cases. This is a difficulty
always connected with great enterprises, to be cured as growth advances
through establishing well trained experts whose judgment makes the rules
not only good in themselves, but well executed. The government itself is
subject to the same difficulty, as seen in the handling of an army, and is
obliged to meet it in the same way. Even the abuses often referred to from
enormous difference of wages between the executive officers and the
inferior operatives are quite possibly only a natural method for solving
these difficulties. A first-class officer has no difficulty with his men.
In general those institutions whose management is costly do better for
their workmen than the weaker institutions with weaker men at the head.
The supposed dangers from too rapid improvement in the machinery of
production are scarcely to be credited in the light of improvements during
the last hundred years. Every improvement has certainly given a larger
enjoyment and better employment to the masses of people. The enterprise
which invents better ways of accomplishing anything is the best possible
means for enlarging and stimulating the wants and abilities of the whole
people. The very profits themselves are sure to awaken larger enterprise,
and even if the accumulated surplus is distributed in so-called watered
stock, it does not cease to promote production. The wider the distribution
of stock, the more permanent and more generally satisfactory is the
working of the great combination. If employés themselves become sharers in
the business, the true interests of all are likely to be promoted. When
the savings of the multitude can be perfectly united in a joint stock
company, to furnish the capital with which the same people work, the
general conditions of wealth production for all the community are fairly
met.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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