Capitalism Demands A Sharing Of The Wealth

“To complain of…the liberal reward of labour..is to lament over the necessary cause and effect of the greatest public prosperity,” states the ‘Bible of Capitalism’. Capitalism Demands A Sharing Of The WealthBy Cliff Montgomery – Oct. 30th, 2008The McCain/Palin camp’s most recent misrepresentation of the Obama/Biden campaign perhaps is the most foolish. It claims that Barack Obama is little more than a socialist–or communist, or Marxist (the name-callers often get confused on the exact nature of their own argument).Why? Because Obama has said that a national economy does best when it ‘shares the wealth’.As usual, there is a fundamental problem with McCain’s thesis: All mainstream economists believe that an economy must be designed to benefit as many people as possible. They only differ on how that is to be achieved.Adam Smith, who in 1776 published The Wealth of Nations–the book often considered the ‘Bible of Capitalism’–was a thinker about as far removed from Karl Marx as one may get. Yet even the high priest of Capitalism understood that sharing the wealth with the people who actually produce it is necessary for a nation to remain strong and free.A few quotes from Mr. Smith’s opus are given below:”A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.””Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage or as an inconveniency to the society?””Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as any inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.” [Italics added.]”To complain of…the liberal reward of labour..is to lament over the necessary cause and effect of the greatest public prosperity.””The liberal reward of labour…increases the industry of the common people. The wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives.”A plentiful subsistence increases the bodily strength of the labourer–and the comfortable hope of bettering his condition, and perhaps of ending his days in ease and plenty–animates him to exert that strength to the utmost. Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent and expeditious than where they are low…””It perhaps deserves to be remarked that it is in the progressive state, while the society is advancing to the further acquisition…that the condition of the labouring poor, of the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest and the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state. The progressive state is in reality the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders of the society. The stationary is dull; the declining, melancholy.””In a country where the funds destined for the maintenance of labour were sensibly decaying…every year the demand for servants and labourers would, in all the different classes of employments, be less than it had been the year before. Many who had been bred in the superior classes, not being able to find employment in their own business, would be glad to seek it in the lowest.”The lowest class being not only overstocked with its own workmen, but with the overflowings of all the other classes, the competition for employment would be so great in it, as to reduce the wages of labour to the most miserable and scanty subsistence of the labourer. Many would not be able to find employment even upon these hard terms, but would either starve, or be driven to seek a subsistence either by begging, or perhaps by the perpetration of the greatest enormities.”Want, famine and mortality would immediately prevail in that class, and from thence extend themselves to all the superior classes, till the number of inhabitants in the country was reduced to what could easily be maintained by the revenue and stock which remained in it, and which had escaped either the tyranny or calamity which had destroyed the rest.””The scanty maintenance of the labouring poor…is the natural symptom that things are at a stand, and their starving condition that they are going fast backwards.”Like what you’re reading so far? Then why not order a full year (52 issues) of thee-newsletter for only $15? 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