Aside from the squabblings of #socialists and #capitalists while #feudalist rent-seekers laugh all the way to their fractional-reserve banks, one major, fundamental aspect of our economy which can't be addressed by analysis of #property is the consequences of the #factory system.
And for that, we turn to Ralph #Borsodi, who detailed the evils of the #factory system in his book, "This Ugly Civilization", in 1929, following on from "The Distribution Age", of 1927.
' What the industrial revolution brought upon us was not the machine but the application of power to the operation of machines. Power did not introduce mankind to the machine. Power merely revolutionized the manner in which man used the machine.
' What is called the industrial revolution was really the economic, social and political changes caused by the transfer of machinery from the home and workshop to the mill and factory.
' The trouble with apologists for the factory is this: they accept w/o question what is the most dangerous social myth of this factory-dominated civilization. They do not realize the idea that mankind's comfort is dependent upon an unending increase in production is a fallacy.
' It is more nearly true to say that happiness is dependent not on producing as much as possible but on producing as little as possible. Comfort and understanding are dependent upon producing only so much as is compatible with the enjoyment of the superior life.
' Producing more than this involves a waste of mankind's most precious possessions. It involves a waste of the only two things which man should really conserve--the two things which be should use with real intelligence and only for what really conduces to his comfort.
' When he destroys these two things, he has destroyed what is for all practical purposes irreplaceable. These two things are the natural resources of the earth and the time which he has to spend in the enjoyment of them.
' When he produces more things than are necessary to good living, he wastes both of them; he wastes time and he wastes material, both of which should be used to make the world a more beautiful place in which to live and life in it more beautiful than it is today.
' I am opposed to the whole tendency toward making the individual a cog in huge factory systems of production and distribution, quite without regard to whether the systems are to be individually, corporately or governmentally owned.
' Complete socialization would be the final step in the process of making man the servant of his own machines, the first step of which was taken when factories were first erected.
' If every individual were willing to sacrifice freedom and initiative in the economic field, society might succeed--as the socialists believe--in eliminating every trace of exploitation from the factory system.
' But the elimination of exploitation by the abolition of private ownership of production and distribution does not reach the root of the trouble. The factory's ineradicable attributes would still remain to plague mankind.
' Socialization or functionalization of the factory will never produce the Utopia for which so many idealists are working. Socialization must fail as a remedy because it does not treat with the real disease which the factory system has inflicted upon mankind.
' Socialization must fail because it contains no balm for efficiency-scourged mankind. For the efficiency that is the quintessence of factory civilization is the real disease which the factory has inflicted upon mankind.
' And efficiency would remain to rob mankind of comfort no matter what form management and ownership of the factory might take. The factory must be efficient. It can survive only by becoming more and more efficient.
' It has to be efficient under private management and ownership. It would have to be efficient even if private management and ownership were changed to public. Mankind's comfort would have to be sacrificed on the altar of the great god efficiency under socialism...
' ...precisely as it has to be under capitalism because the factory system ceases to be economic unless it is efficient enough to absorb the institutional burden which is its inescapable concomitant.
' The factory has to be operated with an efficiency proportioned to the institutional burden because only to a limited extent can it raise prices to cover increasing overhead and distribution costs.
' The individual factory cannot raise prices beyond a certain limit because of the competition of rival factories.
' A whole industry cannot raise prices beyond a certain limit because its products would drive consumers either to the products of other industries or to the production of the goods for themselves. '
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