we produced things for use,
because they were useful and beautiful, we should go on producing with
a good will until everybody had a plentiful supply. If we found
ourselves producing too rapidly, faster than we could consume the
things, we could easily slacken our pace. We could spend more time
beautifying our cities and our homes, more time cultivating our minds
and hearts by social intercourse and in the companionship of the great
spirits of all ages, through the masterpieces of literature, music,
painting and sculpture. But instead, we produce for sale and profit.
When the workers have produced more than the master class can use and
they themselves buy back out of their meagre wages, there is a glut in
the markets of the world, unless a new market can be opened up by
making war upon some defenseless, undeveloped nation.

When there is a glut in the market, Jonathan, you know what happens.
Shops and factories are shut down, the number of workers employed is
reduced, the army of the unemployed grows and there is a rise in the
tide of poverty and misery. Yet why should it be so? Why, simply
because there is a superabundance of wealth, should people be made
poorer? Why should little children go without shoes just because there
are loads of shoes stacked away in stores and warehouses? Why should
people go without clothing simply because the warehouses are bursting
with clothes? The answer is that these things must be so because we
produce for profit instead of for use. All these stores of wealth
belong to the class of profit-takers, the capitalist class, and they
must sell and make profit.

So you see, friend Jonathan, so long as this system lasts, _people
must have too little because they have produced too much_. So long as
this system lasts, there must be periods when we say that society
_cannot afford to have men and women work to maintain themselves
decently_! But under any sane system it will surely be considered the
maddest kind of folly to keep men in idleness while saying that it
does not pay to keep them working. Is there any more expensive way of
keeping either an ass or a man than in idleness?

The root of evil, the taproot from which the evils of modern society
develop, is the profit idea. Life is subordinated to the making of
profit. If it were only possible to embody that idea in human shape,
what a monster ogre it would be! And how we should arraign it at the
bar of human reason! Should we not call up im