The intelligent woman's guide to socialism and capitalismShaw, Bernard
General
The intelligent woman's guide to socialism and capitalism
Shaw, Bernard
Capitalism; Socialism
What do they want it for? Why, to feed the hungry men who cannot be
depended on, not on the chance of their returning the compliment next
year, but for doing some work immediately that will bring in money
later on. There is nothing to prevent any Intelligent Woman with spare
money enough from doing this herself if she has enough invention and
business ability.
Suppose, for instance, she has a big country house in a big park.
Suppose her park blocks up the shortest way from one important town to
another, and that the public roads that go round her park are hilly and
twisty and dangerous for motor cars. She can then use her spare food to
feed the hungry men while they make a road for motors through her park.
When this is done she can send the hungry men away to find another job
as best they can, leaving herself with a new road for the use of which
she can charge a shilling to every motorist who uses it, as they all
will to save time and risk and difficulty. She can keep one of the
hungry men to collect the shillings for her. In this way she will have
changed her spare food into a steady income. In city language, she will
have gone into business as a roadmaker with her own capital.
Now if the traffic on the road be so great that the shillings, and
the spare food they represent, pile themselves up on her hands faster
than she can spend them (or eat them), she will have to find some new
means of spending them to prevent the new spare food going bad. She
will have to call the hungry men back and find something new for them
to do. She might set them to build houses all along the road. Then she
could present the road to the local authorities to be maintained by the
ratepayers as a public street, and yet greatly increase her income by
letting the houses. Having in this way obtained more spare money than
ever, she could establish a service of motor buses to the nearest town
to enable her tenants to work there and her workmen to live there. She
could set up an electric lighting plant and gasworks to supply their
houses. She could turn her big house into a hotel, or knock it down and
cover its site and the park with new houses and streets. The hungry
would do all the executive work for her: what she would have to do
would be to give them the necessary orders and allow them to live on
her spare food meanwhile.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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