For if our analysis of this surplus is correct, it consists in the seizure of a large portion of the fruits of individual and social productive energies, required for the full support and further stimulation of these energies and for the wider human life which they are designed to serve, and their assignment to persons who have not helped to make them, do not need them, and cannot use them.The payment of surplus takes large sections of the income, needed to raise the economic and human efficiency of the working-classes, or to enable society to enlarge the scope and to improve the quality of the public services, and disposes them in ways that are not merely wasteful but injurious.In effect, all the excessive human costs of production and all the defective human utilities of consumption, which our separate analysis of the two processes disclosed, find their concrete and condensed expression in this 'surplus'.The chief injuries it causes may be summarised as follows:
(1).Flowing abundantly as 'unearned' income into the possession of 'wealthy' individuals and classes, it thereby causes large quantities of the national income to be consumed with little or no benefit.For much, if not most, of this surplus, being devoted to luxury, waste, extravagance and 'illth', furnishes by its expenditure not human utility but human 'cost', not an enhancement but a diminution of the sum of human welfare.
(2) By enabling its recipients to disobey the sound biological and moral precept, 'in the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread,' it calls into being and sustains a leisured or unemployed class whose existence represents a loss of productive energy and of wealth-production to the nation.
(3) The evil prestige and attraction of the life of sensational frivolity this idle class is disposed to lead tends by suggestion to sap the wholesome respect for work in the standards of the rest of the community, and to encourage by servile imitation injurious or wasteful methods of expenditure.
(4) The economic necessity of producing this surplus imposes excessive toil upon the productive classes, being directly responsible for the long hours and speeding-up which constitute the heaviest burden of human costs.
The direction which the expenditure of the surplus gives to capital and labour degrades the character of large bodies of workers by setting them to futile, frivolous, vicious or servile tasks.
(5) The disturbing irregularity of the trades which supply the capricious and ever-shifting consumption, upon which the 'surplus' is so largely spent, imposes upon the workers a great cost in the shape of irregularity of employment, and a considerable burden of costly saving by way of insurance against this irregularity.
(6) By stamping with the badge of irrationality and inequity the general process of apportionment of income, the surplus impairs that spirit of human confidence and that consciousness of human solidarity of interests which are the best stimuli of individual and social progress.
The surplus element in private income thus represents the human loss from defects in the current distribution of wealth, not only the loss from wasteful and injurious consumption but from wasteful and injurious production, an exaggeration of human costs and a diminution of human utilities.The primary object of all social-economic reforms should be to dissipate this surplus and to secure its apportionment partly as useful income for individual producers, partly as useful income for society, so that, instead of poisoning the social organism as it does now, it may supply fuller nourishment and stimulus to the life of that organism and its cells.
Thus directed, partly into higher wages of efficiency for workers, partly into further income for the enrichment of the common life, the 'surplus'
