Page:The Case for Capitalism (1920).djvu/262

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bring success under it, and they are also the qualities that makea great nation. With these qualities fully developed and given free play, we might produce a country in which all would be competing vigorously in order to supply the needs of the consumer, and, wealth being well distributed, great profits would only be earned by those who served the whole community best. Great profits when earned would be spent sparingly on personal enjoyment, lavishly on worthy public objects, or put back into industry, thereby quickening production and increasing the demand for labour, and material success would be the prize of energy, initiative and courage, wherever found, and so would stimulate the best powers of active, bold and enterprising men and women. Such a system is surely more attractive to those who love freedom than that of State Socialism under bureaucratic control, or Guild Socialism based on monopoly and a society grouped according to function. It would stimulate output to a degree that we can hardly now conceive, and having solved the problem of the supply and distribution of material goods would enable those who lived under it to address themselves to the task of building up a real civilization,