Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/133

Rh fallacy of this thought, absurd on its very face, and have learned that in business management the hand of the government is the touch of death.

Then we have had the thoughts of syndicalism and communism, founded on the hypotheses that the worker is the only real producer and that by capitalism he had been robbed of his tools and of all but a pittance of his own product. Italy tried syndicalism and wisely rejected it just short of its bringing national disaster. Russia tried communism and found it a formula for the expeditious committal of suicide by the proletariat.

Communism, syndicalism and socialism have all been tried on small and large scales, with disastrous results, so why waste any more time upon them? American labor, in its superior wisdom, does not. American labor has consistently turned its face against false prophets and has been directing itself according to what I shall describe as the parasitic theory of labor. This is founded on the economic theory of the residual claimancy of labor but is a perversion of it. It supports capitalism, because capitalism can make the most production, but aims to claim the maximum that it can and let capitalism survive, which is shrewd but dangerous, for no dog can support too many fleas without running the risk of some impairment of health. The superior brains that are guiding American labor have no patience with communism, which they know spells quick suicide; or with syndicalism, which inexperienced dreamers fatuously expect to be an improvement over the old way of doing things. Oh, no! American labor wants the present management to continue to run things, but wants to mulct it to the very limit that it can without destroying it.