Chapter 14

THE SOCIALISTIC ATTACK ON INTEREST AND THE NATURE OF ITS SEVERAL ERRORS

The practical outcome of the moral attack on interest is logically an attack on bequest.

Modern socialism would logically allow a man to inherit accumulations, and to spend the principal, but not to receive interest on his money as an investment.

What would be the result if all who inherited capital spent it as income, instead of living on the interest of it?

Two typical illustrations of these ways of treating capital.

The ultimate difference between the two results.

What the treatment of capital as income would mean, if the practice were made universal. It would mean the gradual loss of all the added productive forces with which individual genius has enriched the world.

Practical condemnation of proposed attack on interest.

Another aspect of the matter.

Those who attack interest, as distinct from other kinds of money-reward, admit that the possession of wealth is necessary as a stimulus to production.

But the possession of wealth is desired mainly for its social results far more than for its purely individual results.

Interest as connected with the sustentation of a certain mode of social life.

Further consideration of the manner in which those who attack interest ignore the element of time, and contemplate the present moment only.

The economic functions of a class which is not, at a given moment, economically productive.

Systematic failure of those who attack interest to consider society as a whole, continually emerging from the past, and dependent for its various energies on the prospects of the future.

Consequent futility of the general attack on interest, though interest in certain cases may be justly subjected to special but not exaggerated burdens.