I just love this book by Ernest Benn from 1925: Confessions of a Capitalist. It seems to have been a big seller, making a big splash in its day. It is just glorious in so many ways. You can see for yourself now that it is online. I wish I knew whether he was influence by any Austrian thinking. There is a reference to Bastiat. But otherwise, he seems to be rather self made as an intellectual.
Here are some samples.
The saying is that “time is the essence of the contract.” Everyone is familiar with the phrase, but very few really understand it, and a still smaller number act upon it. The most profitable piece of business in existence may be turned into a loss if only sufficient time is taken in carrying it through to completion.
If the theory of exchange is properly understood, the necessity of insistence upon the time factor becomes obvious. You cannot afford to spend more time upon a. piece of work than the equivalent of the time which the consumer is prepared to give up to the acquisition of whatever benefits he derives from that same piece of work. If you do, the balance is upset, and the work is uneconomic. The money-maker must therefore be a. stickler for time. He must work to a timetable and keep himself and everybody else strictly to it. Lack of appreciation of the time factor is one of the most fatal weaknesses of the Labour Movement.
Doing business is doing real things. Things done in business carry with them a satisfaction which does not always attach to things done in the professions, politics, or other walks of life. In that everybody must be satisfied there is absolute and unqualified freedom on every hand. No one is subjected to any form of pressure or coercion. It is no good trying to impose your ideas upon others. You must secure complete agreement all round. You must devote yourself entirely and whole-heartedly to the task of giving satisfaction to both producers and consumers, between whom you stand, or you cannot continue in business.
And then there is the clean air, the honest atmosphere of commerce; an atmosphere cleaner, brighter, and more honest than any other atmosphere I know. It is almost the only department of human activity in which you can get a’ really clear issue, in which everything that is done is done for its own sake without ulterior motive. Such singleness of purpose is seldom possible, for example, in politics., The “yes” or “no” of commerce, simple, straight, understandable, and honest, is hard to find in any other walk of life.
Unless there is saving, life comes to an end. We have only to eat all the potatoes of this year’s crop to make quite sure that no potatoes will exist next year. If we consume every egg that is laid, a couple of seasons would be sufficient to eliminate eggs and poultry from the list of things we enjoy. The argument can be carried right through every branch of human activity.
We all depend absolutely for our continued existence upon the fact that some commodities available for consumption are not, in fact, consumed, but are held over or ” saved,” for future use. This is the bedrock of the capitalist system. It does not even matter who does the saving; the all-important thing is that the saving should be made.
A man who stands behind the counter and serves out cabbages need not look for notoriety. If his cabbages are good, if his manners give no offence, if he refrains from excessive drink and conducts himself with ordinary propriety, he will in time be known as a “respected resident”; but in the main his life will pass without comment, and his only obituary notice will be the inscription on his gravestone. The man who wants to be somebody, on the other hand, and to produce good biographical material, must eat other people’s cabbages and devote himself to agitation. He must make speeches, and write to the papers. He must rail in public about the tenure of the land which produces the cabbages, expatiate on the mode of life of the man who sells the cabbages, or the man who brings them to market: he can, if he will, stir to its depths the public indignation over the price at which the cabbages are sold. In each, or any, of these ways he can become an infinitely more important person than the humdrum individual who merely sees that his fellows are provided with appropriate cabbages. The result of his work as an agitator may be to halve the supply of cabbages, to drive the cabbage merchant out of business; to produce conditions in which only the professional profiteer can venture to touch cabbages; to create artificial restrictions and regulations-in short, to ruin the industry. All this will make for greatness. The more public inconvenience caused by descanting on these questions, the higher will be the public estimate of the professional agitator. It would seem to be essential to make trouble, or at least to be associated with trouble, if you would become a great public character and leave behind a great biography. There is no good copy in the day by day or year by year monotony of an ordinary business career.
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I really like the eggs example of saving. And, oh my goodness, the agitator attribute of becoming “great.” From now on, every great person will be judged by the amount of agitation by me. We’ll see how many “greats” have agitated wrongly and most deceptively.
Ha! I wrote that wrong. I meant: From now on, I’ll try to figure out how much the great person agitated.
I think this book is going to be fast-forwarded to the front of my queue. It looks fascinating.
If only his nephew, who was my MP once upon a time, had as much common sense.
The cabbage quote is wonderful. I agree this is a book worth reading, especially if it is not a derivative work but rather his own original thoughts and observations. There is nothing like reading the thoughts of a truly wise person.
three additional works just went up
http://mises.org/literature.aspx?action=author&Id=1220
I repeat my thanks to you at LvMI. Fun reading.
From Return of Laissez Faire, Ch 18:
THE INDIVIDUALIST AS A POLITICIAN
The reader, so far, will have noticed that we have discussed numerous questions of current party controversy, with a freedom and irresponsibility altogether inconsistent with active loyalty: to anyone of the political parties.
But political parties exist and with the revival in party activity now noticeable in all directions, the Individualist has to ask himself what is his duty, what should he do, and, in particular, how is he to vote? At the Individualist Bookshop we are constantly asked whether it is our intention to run candidates, and whether there will be any attempt to found an Individualist party in the House of Commons itself. I set out our aspirations fairly clearly in the first chapter of this book in the following
terms:
“The challenge of Individualism is making people think, and when the next General Election comes a very large proportion of the voters will have reached the mental stage in which they can clearly see the two alternatives which face us. Are we to continue the pitiful attempt to erect a State whose sole object is to act as wet nurse to the people, sparing them the painful necessity of doing anything for themselves, or are we to develop a people who can support and look after themselves as well as the State? “.
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