POVERTY IN PLENTY
CHAPTER I
THE LACK OF ECONOMIC GOVERNMENT
Until now most business men, industrialists, merchants, financiers, who looked outside the particular operations in which they were engaged, have believed in the existence of an economic system towards which their activities contributed and which, with some allowances for waste and friction, was reasonable, equitable, and efficient. Though there existed no direct and conscious unitary control, or government, of this economic system, certain laws of supply and demand, expressing the play of competitive selfinterest among buyers and sellers of goods and services, were believed to lead everyone, capitalist, worker, or landowner, to apply his productive power in ways most serviceable to society as a whole.
The plight in which the world finds itself to-day has destroyed this conception of an economic system with the complacency it engendered. I am not here concerned with Marxist or other schools of socialists, but with ordinary business men averse from rapid revolutionary changes, who are staggered in their minds by the failure of the system which they have always believed to work with ordinary efficiency. They were accustomed formerly to periodic depressions with a wastage that was relatively small, partial,
