Trusts And the Public
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. INTEGRITY OF ECONOMIC LITERATURE Public opinion, like public taste, appears periodically to run mad on special topics. The subject upon which popular madness is most pronounced at present is accumulated capital. The chief characteristic of the last half century's industrial development has been the concentration of productive processes, the aggregation of large capital, and consequently the appearance of millionaire capitalists. Notwithstanding that these large fortunes are chiefly invested in productive enterprises, earning profit only when they are working for the public by cheapening wealth, the fact that the large concerns succeed, while small ones decline, has given rise to the tacit assumption that large capital necessarily implies business dishonesty and public disadvantage for private gain. Th
...ere is a certain naturalness in this feeling, since those who fail are ever prone to ascribe their failures to somebody else rather than to themselves. It was this feeling that inspired the hand-loom weavers in the beginning of the century to organize mobs to smash the power-looms. The small manufacturers assumed the same injured attitude towards corporations. Small farmers have the same dislike of large farmers. And under the same notion, trade unionists have ever opposed new inventions. Published in the Social Economist of July 1895. This feeling has been made a basis of a general doctrine that profits are robbery, and hence that large capitalists are social robbers. The advocates of socialism, populism, single-tax nationalism, and free trade have all tried to make headway by appealing to and inflaming this sentiment. Iconoclastic propagandas on these lines have been so successful that to attack millionaire capitalists is now something of a fad. Under the infl...
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