Читать книгу The industrial republic: a study of the America of ten years hence онлайн

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Consider our millionaire fortunes, how they grow. Consider, for instance, that Mr. John D. Rockefeller makes fifty per cent. a year upon his holdings in the Standard Oil Company. The stock of the Standard Oil Company is now at five hundred, and has been as high as eight hundred in the market. This is assuming that Mr. Rockefeller invested in the stock at par—though as a matter of fact, he put in only about twenty dollars a share, which would make his profit two hundred and fifty per cent. His income is at least fifty million dollars a year.

What does he do with it? Of course, he can’t spend it—if he treated himself to a St. Louis Exposition every year, he couldn’t spend it. What he does with it is to take it promptly, and reinvest it in the form of new capital; he employs a staff of thirty-two trained experts to aid him in this work. The effect of this is, of course, to make his income fifty per cent., compound interest, instead of simple; and what it will be in the course of time is a problem for those who like figures. While he is doing this, all the other capitalists are doing the same—the American millionaire lets his wife and daughters spend as much of his money as they can, but he seldom spends any himself; he is more interested in “doing things.” The consequence is, therefore, that year after year we are paying the vast mass of our people mere living wages, and all the surplus product of our toil we are selling, and devoting to the creation of new instruments of production. We have, mark you, machinery that creates products for hundreds of times as many men as it employs, and still we skim off the surplus and devote it to making new machines. Is it not obvious that this cannot go on forever? And that the time must come that we make all that we need—or rather that our people have money to buy, wages being what they are? And if that ever happens, then of course the factories will have to shut down. We shall have millions of men out of work, and starving on our streets; and when they form processions and begin agitating, demanding that we give them work, then we say—that is, our newspapers, our preachers, our politicians, everybody says—