Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/76

 72 the worst effects of unemployment, he emerges from it with a heavy millstone of debt and discouragement about his neck, and if it recurs it may make it impossible for him ever to move from those shallows where he is stranded at every ebb of the industrial tide. Now, competitive industry always requires a margin of workless men. The tide is never steady, and the statistics show that at the very best of times from two to three per cent. of skilled men are out of work. That on a working population of 14,000,000 means that 280,000 workers are out of work during booms of trade. That figure rises fourfold and over in times of bad trade, and when we add dependents, we can gain some idea of the disastrous effect of this single flaw in competitive industry.

Now, it is not merely that our present system requires a constant margin of unemployed, it also requires a constant alternation of booms and depressions. It cannot work steadily. It must always go by fits and starts. It is like a steam-engine without a regulator. The market is good and the demand is eager. Off goes every productive machine in the country. Everybody is piling his goods on to the market with a reckless disregard for the morrow. There is no attempt to gauge capacity of consumption; there is no effort made to ascertain where the balance between supply and demand is fixed. The result is a choking of the market, depression in trade, unemployment, financial loss and bankruptcy. So incompetent is