Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/120

dustries which, left to private enterprise, exhibit a strongly monopolistic character. The third is the scientific application of the State powers of taxation, so as to secure for public consumption as much as possible of those surplus earnings that accrue from lucrative businesses which it is convenient to leave to private enterprise.

Here, of course, I merely cite the three familiar departments of progressive economy. But though they seem at first sight only to aim at improved distribution of income, if our analysis of the situation be correct, this progressive economy must be equally effective for the stimulation of enlarged production; for our starting point was the recognition of the huge waste of productive power in our present economic system, attested by the habitual under-use of most of our productive factors, the misapplication of much of them in purely wasteful competition and the periodic idleness of a large part of them.

This actual waste, far exceeding any accepted measurement of unemployment, we traced to the operations in the economic system of a great body of surplus income representing maldistribution. Thus we recognise the problem of greater productivity to be, in fact, inseparable from that of better distribution.

There are those who hold that the solution of this problem can only be achieved by a destruction of the entire fabric of 'the capitalist system.' For only thus, they hold, can the 'surplus income' which causes our maladies be properly absorbed. If they can show that some such wholesale revolution of our economic arrangements is politically feasible, and