Bernard Shaw on inequality

"It is no excuse for such a state of things that the rich give employment. There is no merit in giving employment."

Backbencher is in sort of a medically-induced coma at the moment as I spend the summer filling in for a friend as web editor of the Washington Monthly. In the meantime, here’s an interesting passage from Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism & Capitalism (1928). Shaw has fallen seriously out of fashion, but I’ve lately been reading him, watching DVDs and listening to audiobooks of his plays, and making my way through the one-volume version of Michael Holroyd’s biography. Shaw could be a serious crank (initially sympathetic to Stalin and Hitler, anti-vaxxer, wanted to overhaul the English language phonetically, etc.), but he was also a genius, and compulsively readable. I offer the extract below as evidence.

---

Think of the whole country as a big household, and the whole nation as a big family, which is what they really are. What do we see? Half-fed, badly clothed, abominably housed children all over the place; and the money that should go to feed and clothe and house them properly being spent in millions on bottles of scent, pearl necklaces, pet dogs, racing motor cars, January strawberries that taste like cork, and all sorts of extravagances. One sister of the national family has a single pair of leaking boots that keep her sniffing all through the winter, and no handkerchief to wipe her nose with. Another has forty pairs of high-heeled shoes and dozens of handkerchiefs. A little brother is trying to grow up on a penn’orth of food a day, and is breaking his mother’s heart and wearing out her patience by asking continually for more, whilst a big brother, spending five or six pounds on his dinner at a fashionable hotel, followed by supper at a night club, is in the doctor’s hands because he is eating and drinking too much.

Now this is shockingly bad political economy. When thoughtless people are asked to explain it they say, “Oh, the woman with the forty shoes and the man drinking at the night club got their money from their father who made a fortune by speculating in rubber; and the girl with the broken boots, and the troublesome boy whose mother has just clouted his head, are only riffraff from the slums.” That is true; but it does not alter the fact that the nation that spends money on champagne before it has provided enough milk for its babies, or gives dainty meals to Sealyham terriers and Asatian wolf-hounds and Peingese dogs whilst the infant mortality shews that its children are dying by thousands from insufficient nourishment, is a badly managed, silly, vain, stupid, ignorant nation, and will go to the bad in the long run no matter how hard it tries to conceal its real condition from itself by counting the pearl necklaces and Pekingese dogs as wealth, and thinking itself three times as rich as before when all the pet dogs have litters of six puppies a couple. The only way in which a nation can make itself wealthy and prosperous is by good housekeeping: that is, by providing for its wants in the order of their importance, and allowing no money to be wasted on whims and luxuries until necessities have been thoroughly served.

….

It is no excuse for such a state of things that the rich give employment. There is no merit in giving employment: a murderer gives employment to the hangman; and a motorist who runs over a child gives employment to an ambulance porter, a doctor, and undertaker, a clergyman, a mourning-dressmaker, a hearse driver, a gravedigger; in short, to so many worthy people that when he ends by killing himself it seems ungrateful not to erect a statue to him as a public benefactor. The money with which the rich give the wrong sort of employment would give the right sort of employment if it were equally distributed; for then there would be no money offered for motor cars and diamonds until everyone was fed, clothes, and lodged, nor any wages offered to men and women to leave useful employments and become servants to idlers.