An efficiency engineer estimated that there
is a loss in wealth of some fifty per cent, due to the inability of
the business man to appraise the creative possibilities in industry.
When exploitation of wealth is referred to, those who own it are
generally meant. But exploitation of wealth is the intention of
the worker as well as of the business man. To get, as I have said,
something for (doing) nothing is the dominating _motif_ in the
industrial world. It is supposed to reflect the self-interest of
individuals, to reflect, that is, their economic needs.
This motive of circumscribed self-interest during an era of political
and industrial expansion has been adopted by philosophers as the guide
as well as a clue to conduct; it was hailed by them as a sufficient
and complete motivation for wealth creation; they used it as a basis
of a theory for race progress resting solely on the efforts of men to
satisfy their material needs through their ability to capture goods.
This motive together with the possibilities which machine production
opened up for wealth exploitation, gave birth to the dismal science of
Political Economy; it suggested the materialistic interpretation
of history, and brought to earth utopian schemes of brotherhood.
Political science is dismal because it is an interpretation of
dismal institutions. It may be ungenerous to speak slightingly
of institutions which have yielded such great wealth, which have
transformed inert matter into productive power and brought in
consequence the whole world into acquaintanceship and rivalry.
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