Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/22

8 firmed the findings in my study for. This put this matter outside of the bounds of dispute.

Now let us think of the supreme importance of this establishment. Consider what it has done, and this is a perfect illustration of the reaction of quantitative studies upon the whole field of economics. It has felled the whole Marxian philosophy. It has confirmed in the main the economic doctrine of the residual claimancy of labor as expounded by Jevons and Walker. It has dispelled all fallacies about a wages fund and has affirmed the theory that labor gets what it produces, and that by no possibility can it get any more than it produces. It has exploded the recent contention for a living wage, so called, and the arbitrary guarantee to people of a desired scale of living. On this subject, we have literally backed the labor leaders off the boards. W. Jett Lauck, one of the leading economic exponents of the labor organizations in a recent public communication practically admitted this, receding to the ground that the principle of the guaranteed living wage should be upheld only with respect to a part of the workers, which he explained would not cost very much and therefore would be practicable. Listen to what he says, which was as follows:

“Although the last census reported some persons in gainful occupations, only about  were adult male workers to whom the living wage principle would apply.”

Can you conceive of anything more raw, more brutal and more cruel than this idea of giving to less than half of the workers of the country all that they want and letting the majority go hang? I think that when we have driven the labor leaders to this point and have