How to fix the economy - Part II

This is the second instalment of my three-part adaptation of Stephen Leacock's thoughts on what ails the economy and how to put it right. Part I will be found above, and the conclusion appears below.

Or turn if you will to the moral side. The older way of being good was by much prayer and much effort of one's own soul. Now it is done by a state-appointed board of censors. There is no need to fight sin by the power of the spirit. Let the board of censors do it. They together with three or four kinds of commissions are supposed to keep sinful actions, even sinful thoughts at arm's length, and to supply a first-class legislative guarantee of righteousness.

As a shortcut to morality and as a way of saving individual effort, our legislatures are turning out morality legislation by the bucketful. The legislature regulates our drink, it guards against the deadly cigarette, it regulates here and there the length of our skirts, it safeguards our amusements and in some states of the Union even proposes to save us from the teaching of the Darwinian Theory of Evolution.

The ancient prayer "Lead us not into temptation" is passing out of date. The way to temptation is declared closed by Act of Parliament and by amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Yet oddly enough the moral tone of the world fails to respond. The world is apparently more full of thugs, muggers, bandits, buggers, pornographers, spies and crooked policemen than it ever was. It almost seems that the slow, old-fashioned method of an effort of the individual soul may be needed still before the world is made good.

This vast new system, the system of leaning on the government, is spreading like a blight over America, and everywhere we suffer from it. Government, that in theory represents a union of effort and a saving of force, sprawls like an octopus over the land. It has become like a dead weight upon us.

Wherever it touches industry it cripples it. It runs railways and makes a heavy deficit. It builds ships and loses money on them. It operates the ships and loses more money. It piles up taxes to fill the vacuum and when it has killed employment, opens a bureau of unemployment and issues a report on the depression of industry.

The only way to restore prosperity is to give back again to the individual the opportunity to make money, to make lots of it, and when he has got it, to keep it. The raw assets of our globe are hardly touched. There are vast empty spaces still. The idea of our humanity sadly walking the streets of Buffalo or sitting mournfully fishing on the piers of the Mississippi, out of work, would be laughable if it were not for the pathos of it.

The world is out of work for the simple reason that the world has killed the goose that laid the golden eggs of industry. By taxation, by legislation, by popular sentiment all over the world, there has been a disparagement of the capitalist. And all over the world capital is frightened. It goes and hides itself in the form of an investment in a bond, a thing that is only a particular name for a debt, with no productive effort behind it and indicating only a dead weight of taxes. There capital sits like a bullfrog hidden behind water lilies, refusing to budge.

Hence the way to restore prosperity is not to multiply government departments and government expenditures, nor to appoint commissions and to pile up debts, but to start running again the machinery of bold productive effort.

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.