Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/127

Rh fundamentally an engineer. The whole tradition and training of the engineer is the ascertainment of facts and coming to conclusions from them.

Of course, everybody knows that ascertained facts are often capable of different interpretations. Economists look at things through glasses of different colors, and the difference thereof has its effects. You may have heard of me being characterized as an exponent of capitalism. Let me say immediately that it is a correct characterization in the broad economic sense. Let us have an understanding about this before we go any further. Economically capitalism means the system whereby goods for further employment in the prosecution of affairs are accumulated by the individuals who are intelligent and thrifty. The antithesis of capitalism as an economic system is socialism. Capitalism is not an advocacy of the concentration of wealth in the bands of a few or a repudiation of the desirability of a wider and wider distribution of wealth. Anybody who owns property that is used for the creation of more wealth, whether he be a magnate, who individually owns a railway, or a farmer who owns land, or a mechanic who owns his tools and uses them, is a capitalist. Here I am indeed touching upon one of the abstractions of economics, but it is necessary for a good understanding of what is going on in the world, even in our own country, at the present time. The United States evinces no tendency whatever to become socialistic, but we are nevertheless in my judgment right now conducting our affairs without an understanding of the need for the creation of more capital goods.

There has been much talk during recent months about maintaining in the United States “the tide of