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While an equilibrium between worker and manager is possible, because b — The Acquisitive Society

"While an equilibrium between worker and manager is possible, because both are workers, that which it is sought to establish between worker and owner is not. Their proposals may be excellent: but it is not evident why they are where they are, or how, since they do not contribute to production, they come to be putting forward proposals at all. As long as they are in territory where they have no business to be, their excellence as individuals will be overlooked."
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The Acquisitive Society
The Acquisitive Society
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"This doctrine... implies... that the individual enters the world equipped with rights to the free disposal of his property and the pursuit of his economic self-interest, and that these rights are anterior to, and independent of, any service which he may render. True, the service of society will, in fact, it is assumed, result from their exercise. But it is not the primary motive and criterion of industry, but a secondary consequence... It is not the end at which economic activity aims, or the standard by which it is judged, but a by-product, as coal-tar is."
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The Acquisitive Society
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"By fixing mens minds, not upon the discharge of social obligations, which restricts their energy, because it defines the goal to which it should be directed, but upon the exercise of the right to pursue their own self-interest, it offers unlimited scope for the acquisition of riches... To the strong it promises unfettered freedom... to the weak the hope that they too one day may be strong. Before the eyes of both it suspends a golden prize... the enchanting vision of infinite expansion. It assures men that there are no ends other than their ends, no law other than their desires, no limit... Thus it makes the individual the centre of his own universe, and dissolves moral principles into a choice of expediences. And it... relieves... the necessity of discriminating between... enterprise and avarice, energy and unscrupulous greed, property which is legitimate and property which is theft, the just enjoyment of the fruits of labour and the idle parasitism of birth or fortune... and suggests that excess or defect, waste or superfluity, require no conscious effort of the social will to avert them, but are corrected almost automatically by the mechanical play of economic forces."
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The Acquisitive Society