trol of their jobs.

While one man owns a job on which another man must work in order to
live, the job-owner is the master, and the job-taker is his vassal.
Necessarily, the vassal occupies a position of servility. When he asks
for an opportunity to work, he is asking for an opportunity to live.
When he takes a job he is binding his life and his conduct under terms
prescribed by the job-owner. If he has a family, or owns a home, or is
in any way tied to one spot, he is doubly bound.

The establishment of a producers' society would make each man his own
master in somewhat the same sense that the farmer or the artisan who
owns his land or tools is the arbiter of his own economic destiny. That
is, he would own his job and share in its control.

Thus society would eliminate the inequalities that are now created by
the concentration of ownership and power in a few hands, and would
establish a relative equality among those who produced. The great fear
of the modern worker--the fear of unemployment or job-loss--would also
be eliminated, since the producers, in a society of which they had
control, would be able to hold their own jobs.

These various means would serve to dignify labor and production, and to
establish a society in which prestige and honor would attach to creation
rather than to ownership.

4. _Wisdom in Consumption_

One of the chief weapons of a leisure class is some mark that will
easily distinguish its members from the workers. This mark, in modern
society, is conspicuous consumption. By the quality and style of its
wearing apparel, by the scale of its housing, by the multitude of its
possessions, its luxuries and its enjoyments, the leisure class sets
itself apart from the remainder of the community, advertising to the
world, in the most unmistakable manner, its capacity to spend more than
the members of the working class can earn.

This need for distinction through consumption has set a living standard
which the less well-to-do families seek to emulate. Among the leisured,
there is an eager race to decide which can spend the most lavishly,
while those of less economic means make a determined effort to put on
front and to appear richer than they really are.

The result of this competition among neighbors is an absurd attention to
the quantity and to the cost of possessions, with a comparative
indifference to their intrinsic beauty or to their utility. Nowhere is
this better illustrated than in t