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With this mixed foundation the feeling remains in full force. It serves to check the normal activities of those who “do not have to work,” and to belittle the importance of those who do. It shows, for one result, this pretty paradox: a human creature absolutely helpless, doing nothing whatever to maintain himself or anyone else, depending for the meanest service as for the greatest, on the assistance of others; and then calling himself “independent,” and believing that he “supports” those who keep him alive, by “furnishing them employment”! And—still more paradoxical—the active and valuable persons who so laboriously maintain this ornament believe it, too.

A minor fallacy in our popular economics, but one doing much mischief, is that familiar phrase “the law of demand and supply.” It is in part a logical derivative of the want theory; in part based on a true natural law, and for the rest weakened and confounded by the conditions of our own artificial “market.”

Spencer refers to this with great solemnity in “The Man vs. The State”; showing how smoothly and beautifully great London is provided for by the working of this “law.” He points out the immense numbers of people to be supplied daily, and the immense amount of materials brought in daily, by ship, by rail, by horse and cart, under the wise guidance of individual self-interest and this governing “law of demand and supply.” It sounds very attractive! and when stated by so great a thinker it seems as if it were so. But is it? Are the millions of inhabitants in London thus accurately provided for? Do none starve and freeze? Do none dwindle and sicken, and become hopeless cripples and invalids for lack of proper supplies? Or again, do none waste and spoil, receiving far more than they need? Are the demands of the human body, of the human mind, of the human heart, really supplied in London, or anywhere else, by this alleged law?