How to fix the economy - Part I

This is the beginning of my three-part adaptation of Stephen Leacock's thoughts on what ails the economy and how to put it right. Parts II and III will be found below.

On recent travels through this country, I could not help being struck by the situation of business. Passing through the factory towns and noticing that no smoke came from the tall chimneys and that the doors of the factories were shut, I was led to the conclusion that they were closed.

Observing that the streets of the industrial centres were everywhere filled with idle men, I gathered that they were unemployed. When I learned that the theatres were full to the doors every day and that the concert halls, beer gardens, grand opera and religious concerts were crowded to suffocation, I inferred that the country was suffering from an unparalleled depression.

This diagnosis turned out to be absolutely correct. It has been freely estimated that at the time I refer to, almost two million men and a like number of women were out of work. What with the lowering of dividends and the raising of taxes, the closing of factories, feeding the unemployed and trying to employ the unfed, things are in a bad way.

The underlying cause is plain enough. The economic distress that the world suffers now does not spring from what is happening in Europe or India or China. The danger of industrial collapse comes rather from what is happening in our country itself.

For generations, industry in America and Britain has flourished on individual effort called out by the prospect of individual gain. Every man acquired from his boyhood the idea that he must look after himself. Morally, physically and financially, that was the recognized way of getting on.

The desire to make a fortune was regarded as a laudable ambition, a proper stimulus to effort. The ugly word "profiteer" had not yet been coined. It was not politically incorrect to be a "capitalist". There was no income tax to turn a man's pockets inside out and take away his savings. The world was to the strong.

Under the stimulus of this, the wheels of industry hummed. Factories covered the land. National production grew to a colossal size and the whole outer world seemed laid under a tribute to the great industry.

As a system it was far from perfect. It contained in itself all kinds of gross injustices, demands that were too great, wages that were too small. In spite of the splendor of the foreground, poverty and destitution hovered behind the scenes. But such as it was, the system worked: and it was the only one that we knew.

Or turn to another aspect of this same principle of self-help. The way to acquire knowledge in the early days was to buy a tallow candle and read a book after one's day's work, as Benjamin Franklin read or Abraham Lincoln. And when the soul was stimulated to it, the aspiring youth must save money, put himself through college, live on nothing, think much, and in the course of this starvation and effort become a learned man, with somehow a peculiar moral fibre in him not easily reproduced today.

For today the candle is free and the college is subsidized by the state. The student has "union" like the capitalist's club, with a swimming pool and a drama league and a society coed at his elbow for which he buys American Beauty roses at twenty dollars a dozen.

Adapted from from My Discovery of England, by Stephen Leacock, 1922, Toronto, S.B. Gundy. Stephen Butler Leacock, FRSC (30 December 1869 – 28 March 1944) was a Canadian economist, writer and humorist. He lived and wrote before the rise of the nanny state and political correctness.