Chapter XIV

THE SOCIALISTIC ATTACK ON INTEREST AND THE NATURE OF ITS SEVERAL
ERRORS

The practical outcome of the moral attack on interest is
logically an attack on bequest.

Modern socialism would logically allow a man to inherit
accumulations, and to spend the principal, but not to receive
interest on his money as an investment.

What would be the result if all who inherited capital spent it
as income, instead of living on the interest of it?

Two typical illustrations of these ways of treating capital.

The ultimate difference between the two results.

What the treatment of capital as income would mean, if the
practice were made universal. It would mean the gradual loss of
all the added productive forces with which individual genius has
enriched the world.

Practical condemnation of proposed attack on interest.

Another aspect of the matter.

Those who attack interest, as distinct from other kinds of
money-reward, admit that the possession of wealth is necessary
as a stimulus to production.

But the possession of wealth is desired mainly for its social
results far more than for its purely individual results.

Interest as connected with the sustentation of a certain mode of
social life.

Further consideration of the manner in which those who attack
interest ignore the element of time, and contemplate the present
moment only.

The economic functions of a class which is not, at a given
moment, economically productive.

Systematic failure of those who attack interest to consider
society as a whole, continually emerging from the past, and
dependent for its various energies on the prospects of the
future.

Consequent futility of the general attack on interest, though
interest in certain cases may be justly subjected to special but
not exaggerated burdens.