Загрузка...
Назад в библиотеку
The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice — обложка книги
Читать бесплатно онлайн

The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice

Автор Стивен Батлер Ликок
0+
personВсе книги автора

Удобнее читать в приложении

Читать в TelegramЧитать в MAXЧитать в VKЧитать в WEB
menu_bookЧитать здесь
Дата написания1970-01-01
Язык книгиen
Возрастное ограничение0+
Жанры
личные финансыценные бумаги / инвестициикниги по экономикезарубежная образовательная литературазарубежная старинная литература

Описание

Книга исследует социальную тревогу и экономическую неравномерность в поствоенный период, анализирует классическую экономическую теорию и её ограничения, рассматривает механизмы рынка и монополий, критикует социализм и предлагает постепенные реформы для улучшения условий жизни.

Главный конфликт / проблема

Социальная тревога и неравномерность в условиях промышленного роста и монополий

Ключевые идеи

  • Война и её последствия создают цикл инфляции, недовольства и неравенства.
  • Параллельный рост производства и бедности демонстрирует парадокс индустриальной эпохи.
  • Необходимость пересмотра социальной организации, а не простого перехода к социализму.
  • Классическая экономика основана на идее естественной свободы и индивидуализма.
  • Свободный рынок, по мнению классиков, приводит к социальной справедливости.
  • Механизмы цен, заработной платы, прибыли и аренды рассматриваются как естественные и регулируемые законами.
  • Фундаментальное уравнение стоимости производства и цены является логическим кругом и не объясняет реальное распределение богатства.
  • Необходимость пересмотра принципов естественной свободы в современном обществе.
  • Цены и зарплаты формируются экономической силой, а не справедливостью.
  • Монопольный рынок демонстрирует парадокс стоимости: увеличение объёма снижает цену.
  • Зарплаты зависят от соотношения спроса и предложения труда.
  • Конкурентная индустрия создаёт нестабильное равновесие между работодателями, работниками и потребителями.

Вывод

Книга призывает к глубокому пересмотру социальной организации и постепенным реформам, отвергая радикальные решения

Кому полезна

  • Экономисты
  • Социологи
  • Политологи
  • Студенты
  • Общественные деятели

Главные темы

  • Экономический кризис и социальная неравномерность
  • Классическая экономическая теория и её ограничения
  • Механизмы рынка и монополий
  • Критика социализма и пути реформ

Персонажи

  • Том Джефферсон — Ссылается на его слова о неотъемлемом праве на жизнь, свободу и поиск счастья, которые служат отправной точкой для обсуждения естественной свободы.
  • Адам Смит — Представлен как основатель теории естественной свободы и системы свободного рынка, влияющей на экономические принципы.
  • Джон Стюарт Милль — Упоминается как критик собственности в земле и сторонник более гибкого подхода к собственности, влияя на экономическую мысль.
  • Болшевик — Ведёт волну революции в России, угрожая стабильности и усиливая страх перед революцией.
  • Капиталист — Обвиняет рабочих в «большевизме», а рабочих в «профитизме», представляя противоположную точку зрения.
  • Герой — Он символизирует переход от старого к новому обществу, служит носителем идей социализма в романе Беллмейя.
  • Доктор Лит — Представляет рациональный подход к новому обществу и помогает герою адаптироваться к изменениям.
  • Cincinnatus — Символизирует отказ от честного труда и рост недовольства среди рабочих.
  • Artisan — Сравнивается с фабричным рабочим, чья работа становится рутинной и лишённой смысла.
  • Автор критики — Анализирует роман Беллмейя, обобщает выводы о социализме и демократии, предлагая постепенные реформы.

Цитаты

  • «Всё, что было, было, и всё, что будет, будет, но в этом мире всё равно остаётся бедность».
  • «Если способность производить товары к удовлетворению человеческих нужд умножилась, то мир в целом должен быть гораздо лучше, но он не стал».
  • "ALL men," wrote Thomas Jefferson in framing the Declaration of Independence, "have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
  • "Under perfectly free competition the value or selling price of everything equals, or is perpetually tending to equal, the cost of its production."
  • WAGES and prices, then, if the argument recited in the preceding chapter of this series holds good, do not under free competition tend towards social justice.
  • The enormous increase in the productivity of industrial effort would never of itself have elevated by one inch the lot of the working class.
  • The reading public is as wayward and as fickle as a bee among the flowers.
  • Socialism, in other words, is slavery.

Читать онлайн

Страница 18 из 22

VII.—What Is Possible and What Is Not

SOCIALISM, then, will not work, and neither will individualism, or at least the older individualism that we have hitherto made the basis of the social order. Here, therefore, stands humanity, in the middle of its narrow path in sheer perplexity, not knowing which way to turn. On either side is the brink of an abyss. On one hand is the yawning gulf of social catastrophe represented by socialism. On the other, the slower, but no less inevitable disaster that would attend the continuation in its present form of the system under which we have lived. Either way lies destruction; the one swift and immediate as a fall from a great height; the other gradual, but equally dreadful, as the slow strangulation in a morass. Somewhere between the two lies such narrow safety as may be found.

The Ancients were fond of the metaphor, taken from the vexed Sicilian Seas, of Scylla and Charybdis. The twin whirlpools threatened the affrightened mariner on either side. To avoid one he too hastily cast the ship to destruction in the other. Such is precisely the position that has been reached at the present crisis in the course of human progress. When we view the shortcomings of the present individualism, its waste of energy, its fretful overwork, its cruel inequality and the bitter lot that it brings to the uncounted millions of the submerged, we are inclined to cry out against it, and to listen with a ready ear to the easy promises of the idealist. But when we turn to the contrasted fallacies of socialism, its obvious impracticality and the dark gulf of social chaos that yawns behind it, we are driven back shuddering to cherish rather the ills we have than fly to others we know not of.

Yet out of the whole discussion of the matter some few things begin to merge into the clearness of certain day. It is clear enough on the one hand that we can expect no sudden and complete transformation of the world in which we live. Such a process is impossible. The industrial system is too complex, its roots are too deeply struck and its whole organism of too delicate a growth to permit us to tear it from the soil. Nor is humanity itself fitted for the kind of transformation which fills the dreams of the perfectionist. The principle of selfishness that has been the survival instinct of existence since life first crawled from the slime of a world in evolution, is as yet but little mitigated. In the long process of time some higher cosmic sense may take its place. It has not done so yet. If the kingdom of socialism were opened to-morrow, there are but few fitted to enter.

But on the other hand it is equally clear that the doctrine of "every man for himself," as it used to be applied, is done with forever. The time has gone by when a man shall starve asking in vain for work; when the listless outcast shall draw his rags shivering about him unheeded of his fellows; when children shall be born in hunger and bred in want and broken in toil with never a chance in life. If nothing else will end these things, fear will do it. The hardest capitalist that ever gripped his property with the iron clasp of legal right relaxes his grasp a little when he thinks of the possibilities of a social conflagration. In this respect five years of war have taught us more than a century of peace. It has set in a clear light new forms of social obligation. The war brought with it conscription—not as we used to see it, as the last horror of military tyranny, but as the crowning pride of democracy. An inconceivable revolution in the thought of the English speaking peoples has taken place in respect to it. The obligation of every man, according to his age and circumstance, to take up arms for his country and, if need be, to die for it, is henceforth the recognized basis of progressive democracy.

But conscription has its other side. The obligation to die must carry with it the right to live. If every citizen owes it to society that he must fight for it in case of need, then society owes to every citizen the opportunity of a livelihood. "Unemployment," in the case of the willing and able becomes henceforth a social crime. Every democratic Government must henceforth take as the starting point of its industrial policy, that there shall be no such thing as able bodied men and women "out of work," looking for occupation and unable to find it. Work must either be found or must be provided by the State itself.

Yet it is clear that a policy of state work and state pay for all who are otherwise unable to find occupation involves appalling difficulties. The opportunity will loom large for the prodigal waste of money, for the undertaking of public works of no real utility and for the subsidizing of an army of loafers. But the difficulties, great though they are, are not insuperable. The payment for state labor of this kind can be kept low enough to make it the last resort rather than the ultimate ambition of the worker. Nor need the work be useless. In new countries, especially such as Canada and the United States and Australia, the development of latent natural assets could absorb the labor of generations. There are still unredeemed empires in the west. Clearly enough a certain modicum of public honesty and integrity is essential for such a task; more, undoubtedly, than we have hitherto been able to enlist in the service of the commonwealth. But without it we perish. Social betterment must depend at every stage on the force of public spirit and public morality that inspires it.

So much for the case of those who are able and willing to work. There remain still the uncounted thousands who by accident or illness, age or infirmity, are unable to maintain themselves. For these people, under the older dispensation, there was nothing but the poorhouse, the jail or starvation by the roadside. The narrow individualism of the nineteenth century refused to recognize the social duty of supporting somebody else's grandmother. Such charity began, and ended, at home. But even with the passing of the nineteenth century an awakened sense of the collective responsibility of society towards its weaker members began to impress itself upon public policy. Old age pension laws and national insurance against illness and accident were already being built into the legislative codes of the democratic countries. The experience of the war has enormously increased this sense of social solidarity. It is clear now that our fortunes are not in our individual keeping. We stand or fall as a nation. And the nation which neglects the aged and infirm, or which leaves a family to be shipwrecked as the result of a single accident to a breadwinner, cannot survive as against a nation in which the welfare of each is regarded as contributory to the safety of all. Even the purest selfishness would dictate a policy of social insurance.

Страница 18 из 22

Назад1…171819…22Далее

Вам также может понравиться

The Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn — обложка книги

The Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn

Thomas Robert Malthus

Observations on the Effects of the Corn Laws, and of a Rise or Fall in the Price of Corn on the Agriculture and General Wealth of the Country — обложка книги

Observations on the Effects of the Corn Laws, and of a Rise or Fall in the Price of Corn on the Agriculture and General Wealth of the Country

Thomas Robert Malthus

An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent, and the Principles by Which It is Regulated — обложка книги

An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent, and the Principles by Which It is Regulated

Thomas Robert Malthus