[A Critical Examination of Socialism by William Hurrell Mallock]@TWC D-Link book
A Critical Examination of Socialism

CHAPTER XI
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The thought of money for themselves never enters into their minds.

The selfish desire for money makes its appearance only when the strong man whose ability is merely acquisitive thrusts himself on the scene, buys the inventors' inventions up, and then proceeds "to work them for all they are worth." These mere seizers of wealth, these appropriators of the inventions of others, need but to learn a lesson of abnegation which the inventors have learned already, or rather a lesson which is easier; for while these noble men, the inventors, have no wish to take what they produce, the majority of able men, such as the steel kings and the oil kings, need merely forbear to take.

Competition, in short, as it actually exists to-day--the competition which Christian socialism will abolish--is simply a competition in taking; and in order to abolish it, the strong men, when they have taken a fair share, have but to stand aside, to become as though they were weak, and so give others a chance equal to their own.
Here, indeed, we have a conception, or rather a vague picture, of the facts of modern industry, and of human nature as connected with it, which is worthy of a man from dreamland.

Every detail mentioned is false.

Every essential detail is omitted.


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