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The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice — обложка книги
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The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice

Автор Стивен Батлер Ликок
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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.

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Rent, the share of the land-owner, offered to the classicist a rather peculiar case. There was here a physical basis of surplus over cost. But, granted the operation of the factors and forces concerned, rent emerged as a differential payment to the fortunate owner of the soil. It did not in any way affect prices or wages, which were rendered neither greater nor less thereby. The full implication of the rent doctrine and its relation to social justice remained obscured to the eye of the classical economist; the fixed conviction that what a man owns is his own created a mist through which the light could not pass.

Wages, finally, were but a further case of value. There was a demand for labor, represented by the capital waiting to remunerate it, and a supply of labor represented by the existing and increasing working class. Hence wages, like all other shares and factors, corresponded, so it was argued, to social justice. Whether wages were high or low, whether hours were long or short, at least the laborer like everybody else "got what was coming to him." All possibility of a general increase of wages depended on the relation of available capital to the numbers of the working men.

Thus the system as applied to society at large could be summed up in the consoling doctrine that every man got what he was worth, and was worth what he got; that industry and energy brought their own reward; that national wealth and individual welfare were one and the same; that all that was needed for social progress was hard work, more machinery, more saving of labor and a prudent limitation of the numbers of the population.

The application of such a system to legislation and public policy was obvious. It carried with it the principle of laissez-faire. The doctrine of international free trade, albeit the most conspicuous of its applications, was but one case under the general law. It taught that the mere organization of labor was powerless to raise wages; that strikes were of no avail, or could at best put a shilling into the pocket of one artisan by taking it out of that of another; that wages and prices could not be regulated by law; that poverty was to a large extent a biological phenomenon representing the fierce struggle of germinating life against the environment that throttles part of it. The poor were like the fringe of grass that fades or dies where it meets the sand of the desert. There could be no social remedy for poverty except the almost impossible remedy of the limitation of life itself. Failing this the economist could wash his hands of the poor.

These are the days of relative judgments and the classical economy, like all else, must be viewed in the light of time and circumstance. With all its fallacies, or rather its shortcomings, it served a magnificent purpose. It opened a road never before trodden from social slavery towards social freedom, from the mediæval autocratic régime of fixed caste and hereditary status towards a régime of equal social justice. In this sense the classical economy was but the fruition, or rather represented the final consciousness of a process that had been going on for centuries, since the breakdown of feudalism and the emancipation of the serf. True, the goal has not been reached. The vision of the universal happiness seen by the economists has proved a mirage. The end of the road is not in sight. But it cannot be doubted that in the long pilgrimage of mankind towards social betterment the economists guided us in the right turning. If we turn again in a new direction, it will at any rate not be in the direction of a return to autocratic mediævalism.

But when all is said in favor of its historic usefulness, the failures and the fallacies of natural liberty have now become so manifest that the system is destined in the coming era to be revised from top to bottom. It is to these failures and fallacies that attention will be drawn in the next chapter.

III.—The Failures and Fallacies of Natural Liberty

THE rewards and punishments of the economic world are singularly unequal. One man earns as much in a week or even in a day as another does in a year. This man by hard, manual labor makes only enough to pay for humble shelter and plain food. This other by what seems a congenial activity, fascinating as a game of chess, acquires uncounted millions. A third stands idle in the market place asking in vain for work. A fourth lives upon rent, dozing in his chair, and neither toils nor spins. A fifth by the sheer hazard of a lucky "deal" acquires a fortune without work at all. A sixth, scorning to work, earns nothing and gets nothing; in him survives a primitive dislike of labor not yet fully "evoluted out;" he slips through the meshes of civilization to become a "tramp," cadges his food where he can, suns his tattered rags when it is warm and shivers when it is cold, migrating with the birds and reappearing with the flowers of spring.

Yet all are free. This is the distinguishing mark of them as children of our era. They may work or stop. There is no compulsion from without. No man is a slave. Each has his "natural liberty," and each in his degree, great or small, receives his allotted reward.

But is the allotment correct and the reward proportioned by his efforts? Is it fair or unfair, and does it stand for the true measure of social justice?

This is the profound problem of the twentieth century.

The economists and the leading thinkers of the nineteenth century were in no doubt about this question. It was their firm conviction that the system under which we live was, in its broad outline, a system of even justice. They held it true that every man under free competition and individual liberty is awarded just what he is worth and is worth exactly what he gets: that the reason why a plain laborer is paid only two or three dollars a day is because he only "produces" two or three dollars a day: and that why a skilled engineer is paid ten times as much is because he "produces" ten times as much. His work is "worth" ten times that of the plain laborer. By the same reasoning the salary of a corporation president who receives fifty thousand dollars a year merely reflects the fact that the man produces—earns—brings in to the corporation that amount or even more. The big salary corresponds to the big efficiency.

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