It was the first time I had ever heard Karl Marx's[1] doctrine of surplus value elaborated, and Ernest had done it so simply that I, too, sat puzzled and dumfounded.
"'I'll tell you a way to get rid of the surplus," Ernest said. "Throw it into the sea. Throw every year hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of shoes and wheat and clothing and all the commodities of commerce into the sea. Won't that fix it?"
"It will certainly fix it," Mr. Calvin answered. "But it is absurd for you to talk that way."
Ernest was upon him like a flash.
"Is it a bit more absurd than what you advocate, you machine-breaker, returning to the antediluvian ways of your forefathers? What do you propose in order to get rid of the surplus? You would escape the problem of the surplus by not producing any surplus. And how do you propose to avoid producing a surplus? By returning to a primitive method of production, so confused and disorderly and irrational, so wasteful and costly, that it will be impossible to produce a surplus."
Mr. Calvin swallowed. The point had been driven home. He swallowed again and cleared his throat.
- ↑ Karl Marx—the great intellectual hero of Socialism. A German Jew of the nineteenth century. A contemporary of John Stuart Mill. It seems incredible to us that whole generations should have elapsed after the enunciation of Marx's economic discoveries, in which time he was sneered at by the world's accepted thinkers and scholars. Because of his discoveries he was banished from his native country, and he died an exile in England.
