THE YOUNG CAPITALIST
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—Your contributor, Mr. Thomas Burns, in his inspiring article " The Young Capitalist," need not fear that the Socialist will steal his thunder. Unfortunately, the Socialist still thinks that in order to make the poor rich it is necessary to make the rich poor. Mr. Burns is wiser than that, but he fails to see that wage-raising and profit-sharing do no more than re-shuffle the insufficient supply of money within the production-consumption system. That glut of idle money in the banks is a mere drop in the ocean required to purchase the avalanche of goods and services modern science can pro- duce. It has been established, and never disproved, that the sum of all profits, wages and salaries can never, at any stretch, be brought to equal the total prices of goods produced.
Also, as unemployment grows (by virtue of increased power-production) fewer people are numbered among the wage-earners and possible profit-sharers.
Mr. Burns should consider the introduction into the pro- duction-consumption system, from outside it, some extra purchasing power ; and this must be distributed to the unemployed population as well as to the wage-earners to be of effect in the way that Mr. Burns visions. But if that happened his vision would speedily become reality.-Yours,
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