Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/228

214 storm has passed away and the skies are blue, at an enormous profit to the very same people who have just sold it at such ridiculous prices. They buy it up again during the next panic, at the same low rates, and play the cruel game as often as a few years of peaceful industry have refilled the emptied money drawers of the producing classes. Financial crises are simply the piston strokes with which the capitalists pump the savings of the Industrial classes into their own reservoirs.

The advocates of speculating say that the speculator plays an important and necessary role in the great drama of political economy; that his gains are the results of superior sagacity, deeper insight, prompter decision and more adventurous daring. This argument pleases me; let us seize and examine it. Therefore, because the speculator has means of information at his disposal which are inaccessible to the general public, because he has less dread of losses than the prudent and honest man, and takes advantage of all possibilities in a more underhanded way, he has a right to take away from the laboring classes the results of their labor, and allow it to accumulate for himself, while he takes his ease. This right is consequently based upon the fact that he has better weapons—his sources of information, greater courage—as he hazards only the money of others, and superior strength of judgment and intelligence. Now let us see if the poorer classes have not even better weapons—rifles and dynamite bombs, greater courage—as they are willing to risk their lives, and superior strength—of bone and sinew. If this is the case, and it is, the advocates of speculation must concede to the laboring classes the right of taking away from the speculators the results of their so-called labor. If they do not concede this right to the one class as well as to the other, then the theory upon which the justification of