Whenever any burden is placed upon capital
it immediately sets about unloading that burden on the public. Wages
might be doubled by Act of Parliament, and the net result would be to
double prices, if not to increase them still more. The more the
autocrats of industry are federated the more easily can they unload on
others any burden placed on them.
The value of money is simply what it will purchase at any time. If the
rulers of industry can halve the purchasing power of money while
doubling wages at the command of the State, logic leads us to assume
that wages boards, arbitration boards and the like can only be
transitory in their meliorating effect; and to pursue the attack on the
autocrats of industry by the road of wages alone is to attack them where
they are impregnable, and where, seeming to give way, they are all the
while really losing nothing, and are only fixing the wage system more
permanently on those who attack them. There are fiery spirits among the
proletarians who hope that militant labor will at last bring about the
social revolution, taking the earthly paradise by violence.
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