Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Wealth and Income of the American People (1924).pdf/213

Rh economists, not merely by socialists, that the state of society would be improved by a “more equitable division of wealth.” This may be analyzed into two ideas, first, that the present division is inequitable, and second, that the common welfare would be improved by something different. The first of these ideas shows blindness to the methods of creating wealth. It looks upon the natural resources of the world as being the only original element of wealth and considers that because some people have land and others have not there is something inequitable in the division of land. This takes no account of the part that mind plays in the creation of wealth. It ignores the existence of intangible wealth, a subject upon which I have dwelled in an earlier chapter.

At this moment the air of the atmosphere is free to everybody. Anybody can have as much of it as he desires. It is not even wealth, for it has no value in exchange. But even now the air is becoming a great source of nitrogen for the manufacture of fertilizer for our soil. Inventive and creative minds will find a source of great wealth in such production. How will there be any more equitable distribution of such wealth than the retention of it by those who created it? This illustration is not chimerical, for the extraction of nitrogen from the air is already an art that has attained large proportions. In 1912, the world’s production of nitrogen in all forms was 715,678 metric tons of which 32,342 were derived from the air, while in 1920 the world’s total was 1,555,300 tons, whereof 671,300 tons were won from the air.

I may give another illustration from the metal mining industry, one of the great basic industries,