Where Do Jobs Come From?
Henry H. Hardinge
[Reprinted from Land & Liberty, September
1939]
IMAGINE IF you can a national convention of sausage makers and
dealers in which a delegate arises in his place and says, " Mr
Chairman: I am a delegate to this convention. I buy and sell sausage.
I also like them. I eat them for breakfast, but there is one thing I
have never been able to discover, and that is, where do sausages come
from? That is a profound mystery, and I have never been able to solve
it." What would the delegates do to that fellow ? They would all
laugh at him and the chairman would rule him out of order, and he
certainly would be especially funny in his upper balcony.
Now here is a parallel case. In the United States, we, as a nation,
have been discussing for nearly four years the question of work and
workless men, and in all of that time not a man whose name is known to
the nation has had the native wit to ask a few simple, childlike
questions about this matter about which so much printer's ink has been
spilled. Yet it is perfectly obvious to us that the very first
question that an intelligent and thoughtful people should ask is this.
What is work? Why does anyone want work? Where do they get work from
in the first place?
Who gave the Indians work before we arrived? Who gave work to
the early colonists ? How did they obtain employment?
These are simple questions and susceptible of simple answers. Does
not our food, our clothing, our shelter, all of our supplies come from
the same source as did the early settlers? How does it happen that we
have suddenly run out of work, and are now making the most heroic yet
futile efforts to create work by law, by borrowing money, by running
into debt in unthinkable billions when as a matter of fact work should
be as plentiful as wants, since all work comes from wants. If people
did not want things they would certainly not want work. How
does it happen that there is this vast disparity between work and
wants, since all work originates in wants. These are searching
questions, and yet they have not been raised by the gentlemen who
essay the role of leaders in this country. No consecrated absurdity
would long have survived in this world if the man had not suppressed
the eager questions of the child.
These questions should be on the lips of every voter in this country,
but so badly warped and twisted is the thinking of the average citizen
that he finds himself in a perfect maze of contradictions and
impossible absurdities, and the brain trust of Washington
simply adds to the babel of confusion.
If our schools were one half as efficient as we like to believe they
are, there is not a boy or girl of twelve who should not be able to
answer these simple questions fight off the bat, but also,
even our muddled statesmen lack the necessary gumption to
either ask or answer these simple questions. They are exactly on a par
in their intellectual equipment with the puzzled delegate to the
sausage makers' convention.
Everyone knows that it takes work to make sausage. They also know
that if no one ate sausage there would be no work for sausage makers.
This goes also for everything else that the human race eats, uses or
wears. It goes for every cigarette that is smoked and turned from
tobacco and paper to ashes. It goes for everything that is turned from
cotton field to rag bag, from orchard to apple pie and iron ore to
locomotives. It goes for everything that makes life livable, women
lovable, and children adorable. It all comes from the same source,
from land. I feel sometimes like screaming it at you, it is so
obviously, urgently, insistently and undeniably a land question. The
ignorant hypothetical sausage dealer is in no worse condition mentally
than are tens of millions of American citizens who, with votes in
their hands and possessed of political power are as helpless as a lot
of voteless helots in the Middle Ages, because they are reared under
an economic system they are afraid to discuss or even to examine. It
is the most appalling, intriguing, exasperating and wholly disturbing
situation that the human race has ever faced. It requires just two
qualities to settle the question now before the house. One is moral
courage, the other is a modest sum of intelligence unclouded by
prejudice and tradition. This sounds simple, and it yet remains to be
proven whether the American people possess either of these qualities
in sufficient amounts to solve the problems which to-day confront
them. Time alone will tell.
There is no indication as yet that the leaders of American public
opinion possess the discernment and the courage to raise and to
discuss in thinking terms the land question, which contains not only
the basic elements of ships and soap and sealing wax, cabbages and
kings, but it will be found on close inspection that little farm
sausages come from land just as does corn whiskey, sauerkraut, and
ink, and especially the printer's ink which is so cleverly used all
over this broad land to camouflage the land question. There is not a
silly experiment with money now being tried out in Washington to
secure a better and fairer distribution of wealth which has not been
tried over and over again ever since money was invented and with
exactly the same result, either a stalemate or a disaster. Saucepan
thinking never yet solved a major problem in economics and it never
will. In the whole history of the American people they have got away
from and ran away from their economic problems by going west across
the vast and unmonopolized acres of a new and undeveloped continent,
and they have now reached the Pacific Ocean, but they have not reached
a Pacific land. On the contrary, they are now on the edge of
more turmoil than this country has known, since the Civil War, and we
have the biggest job of constructive thinking just ahead of us that we
have ever faced. To help us out on this ambitious job, we have the
finest assortment of imported European superstitions to light our path
that ever discredited, distracted and bedevilled a nation and the "trained
seals " of the Universities merely add squeals and roars to the
general clamor which assail the cardrums of every man whose tympanums
are in working order and who knows the difference between a charlatan
and a scientist or between a professional obscurantist and a
philosopher like Henry George.
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