WEBVTT NOTE XXIV. Harmony and Conflict of Interests 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 Chapter 24 Harmony and Conflict of Interests 2 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:12.000 1. The Ultimate Source of Profit and Loss on the Market 3 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:21.000 The changes in the data whose reiterated emergence prevents the economic system from turning into an evenly rotating economy, 4 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:32.000 and produces again and again entrepreneurial profit and loss are favorable to some members of society and unfavorable to others. 5 00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:37.000 Hence, people concluded, the gain of one man is the damage of another. 6 00:00:37.000 --> 00:00:42.000 No man profits but by the loss of others. 7 00:00:42.000 --> 00:00:46.000 This dogma was already advanced by certain ancient authors. 8 00:00:46.000 --> 00:00:50.000 Among modern writers, Montaigne was the first to restate it. 9 00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:58.320 it. We may fairly call it the Montane Dogma. It was the quintessence of the doctrines of mercantilism, 10 00:00:58.320 --> 00:01:04.880 old and new. It is at the bottom of all modern doctrines teaching that there prevails, 11 00:01:04.880 --> 00:01:10.960 within the frame of the market economy, an irreconcilable conflict among the interests 12 00:01:10.960 --> 00:01:17.840 of various social classes within a nation, and, furthermore, between the interests of any nation 13 00:01:17.840 --> 00:01:20.840 and those of all other nations. 14 00:01:20.840 --> 00:01:30.840 Now the Montaigne dogma is true with regard to the effects of cash-induced changes in the purchasing power of money on deferred payments. 15 00:01:30.840 --> 00:01:37.840 But it is entirely wrong with regard to any kind of entrepreneurial profit or loss, 16 00:01:37.840 --> 00:01:45.840 whether they emerge in a stationary economy in which the total amount of profits equals the total amount of losses, 17 00:01:45.840 --> 00:01:53.580 or in a progressing or a retrogressing economy in which these two magnitudes are different. 18 00:01:53.580 --> 00:01:59.540 What produces a man's profit in the course of affairs within an unhampered market society 19 00:01:59.540 --> 00:02:06.520 is not his fellow citizen's plight and distress, but the fact that he alleviates or entirely 20 00:02:06.520 --> 00:02:12.460 removes what causes his fellow citizen's feeling of uneasiness. 21 00:02:12.460 --> 00:02:18.300 What hurts the sick is the plague, not the physician who treats the disease. 22 00:02:18.300 --> 00:02:24.220 The doctor's gain is not an outcome of the epidemics, but of the aid he gives to those 23 00:02:24.220 --> 00:02:25.860 affected. 24 00:02:25.860 --> 00:02:31.820 The ultimate source of profits is always the foresight of future conditions. 25 00:02:31.820 --> 00:02:37.400 Those who succeeded better than others in anticipating future events, and in adjusting 26 00:02:37.400 --> 00:02:43.040 and their activities to the future state of the market reap profits because they are in 27 00:02:43.040 --> 00:02:47.920 a position to satisfy the most urgent needs of the public. 28 00:02:47.920 --> 00:02:53.440 The profits of those who have produced goods and services for which the buyers scramble 29 00:02:53.440 --> 00:02:58.560 are not the source of the losses of those who have brought to the market commodities 30 00:02:58.560 --> 00:03:03.820 in the purchase of which the public is not prepared to pay the full amount of production 31 00:03:03.820 --> 00:03:06.180 costs expended. 32 00:03:06.180 --> 00:03:12.220 These losses are caused by the lack of insight displayed in anticipating the future demand 33 00:03:12.220 --> 00:03:15.380 of the consumers. 34 00:03:15.380 --> 00:03:22.100 External events affecting demand and supply may sometimes come so suddenly and unexpectedly 35 00:03:22.100 --> 00:03:27.420 that people say that no reasonable man could have foreseen them. 36 00:03:27.420 --> 00:03:34.540 Then the envious may consider the profits of those who gain from the change as unjustified. 37 00:03:34.540 --> 00:03:40.780 But such arbitrary value judgments do not alter the real state of interests. It is certainly 38 00:03:40.780 --> 00:03:48.020 better for a sick man to be cured by a doctor for a high fee than to lack medical assistance. 39 00:03:48.020 --> 00:03:52.340 If it were otherwise, he would not consult the physician. 40 00:03:52.340 --> 00:03:59.260 There are in the market economy no conflicts between the interests of the buyers and sellers. 41 00:03:59.260 --> 00:04:03.740 There are disadvantages caused by inadequate foresight. 42 00:04:03.740 --> 00:04:09.340 It would be a universal boon if every man and all the members of the market society 43 00:04:09.340 --> 00:04:16.240 would always foresee future conditions correctly and in time and act accordingly. 44 00:04:16.240 --> 00:04:21.700 If this were the case, retrospection would establish that no particle of capital and 45 00:04:21.700 --> 00:04:28.300 labor was wasted for the satisfaction of wants which now are considered as less urgent than 46 00:04:28.300 --> 00:04:35.460 and some other unsatisfied ones. However, man is not omniscient. 47 00:04:35.460 --> 00:04:41.180 It is wrong to look at these problems from the point of view of resentment and envy. 48 00:04:41.180 --> 00:04:48.580 It is no less faulty to restrict one's observation to the momentary position of various individuals. 49 00:04:48.580 --> 00:04:53.900 These are social problems and must be judged with regard to the operation of the whole 50 00:04:53.900 --> 00:04:56.180 and the whole market system. 51 00:04:56.180 --> 00:05:02.400 What secures the best possible satisfaction of the demands of each member of society is 52 00:05:02.400 --> 00:05:08.380 precisely the fact that those who succeeded better than other people in anticipating future 53 00:05:08.380 --> 00:05:11.740 conditions are earning profits. 54 00:05:11.740 --> 00:05:18.220 If profits were to be curtailed for the benefit of those whom a change in the data has injured, 55 00:05:18.220 --> 00:05:25.500 The adjustment of supply to demand would not be improved but impaired. If one were to prevent 56 00:05:25.500 --> 00:05:32.260 doctors from occasionally earning high fees, one would not increase but rather decrease 57 00:05:32.260 --> 00:05:39.820 the number of those choosing the medical profession. The deal is always advantageous both for the 58 00:05:39.820 --> 00:05:46.700 buyer and the seller. Even a man who sells at a loss is still better off than he would 59 00:05:46.700 --> 00:05:53.520 would be if he could not sell at all, or only at a still lower price. He loses on account 60 00:05:53.520 --> 00:06:01.380 of his lack of foresight. The sale limits his loss, even if the price received is low. 61 00:06:01.380 --> 00:06:07.180 If both the buyer and the seller were not to consider the transaction as the most advantageous 62 00:06:07.180 --> 00:06:12.380 action they could choose under the prevailing conditions, they would not enter into the 63 00:06:12.380 --> 00:06:14.500 deal. 64 00:06:14.500 --> 00:06:21.220 The statement that one man's boon is the other man's damage is valid with regard to robbery, 65 00:06:21.220 --> 00:06:23.260 war and booty. 66 00:06:23.260 --> 00:06:27.860 The robber's plunder is the damage of the despoiled victim. 67 00:06:27.860 --> 00:06:31.900 But war and commerce are two different things. 68 00:06:31.900 --> 00:06:40.140 Voltaire aired when, in 1764, he wrote in the article Patrie of his Dictionnaire philosophique, 69 00:06:40.140 --> 00:06:50.140 To be a good patriot is to wish that one's own community should enrich itself by trade and acquire power by arms. 70 00:06:50.140 --> 00:07:00.140 It is obvious that a country cannot profit but at the expense of another, and that it cannot conquer without inflicting harm on other people. 71 00:07:00.140 --> 00:07:09.140 Voltaire, like so many other authors who preceded and followed him, deemed it superfluous to familiarize himself with economic thought. 72 00:07:09.140 --> 00:07:19.140 If he had read the essays of his contemporary David Hume, he would have learned how false it is to identify war and foreign trade. 73 00:07:19.140 --> 00:07:30.140 Voltaire, the great debunker of age-old superstitions and popular fallacies, fell prey unawares to the most disastrous fallacy. 74 00:07:30.140 --> 00:07:37.140 When the baker provides the dentist with bread, and the dentist relieves the baker's toothache, 75 00:07:37.140 --> 00:07:40.640 Neither the baker nor the dentist is harmed. 76 00:07:40.640 --> 00:07:51.640 It is wrong to consider such an exchange of services and the pillage of the baker's shop by armed gangsters as two manifestations of the same thing. 77 00:07:51.640 --> 00:08:04.640 Foreign trade differs from domestic trade only insofar as goods and services are exchanged beyond the borderlines separating the territories of two sovereign nations. 78 00:08:04.640 --> 00:08:30.640 It is monstrous that Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the later Emperor Napoleon III, should have written many decades after Hume, Adam Smith and Ricardo, the quantity of merchandise which a country exports is always in direct proportion to the number of shells it can discharge upon its enemies whenever its honor and its dignity may require it. 79 00:08:30.640 --> 00:08:49.640 All the teachings of economics concerning the effects of the international division of labor and of international trade have up to now failed to destroy the popularity of the mercantilist fallacy, that the object of foreign trade is to pauperize foreigners. 80 00:08:49.640 --> 00:08:59.640 It is a task of historical investigation to disclose the sources of the popularity of this and other similar delusions and errors. 81 00:08:59.640 --> 00:09:10.320 2. THE LIMITATION OF OFFSPRING 82 00:09:10.320 --> 00:09:16.600 The natural scarcity of the means of sustenance forces every living being to look upon all 83 00:09:16.600 --> 00:09:22.960 other living beings as deadly foes in the struggle for survival, and generates pitiless 84 00:09:22.960 --> 00:09:25.800 and its biological competition. 85 00:09:25.800 --> 00:09:33.320 But with man, these irreconcilable conflicts of interests disappear when, and as far as, 86 00:09:33.320 --> 00:09:40.160 the division of labor is substituted for economic autarchy of individuals, families, tribes 87 00:09:40.160 --> 00:09:42.400 and nations. 88 00:09:42.400 --> 00:09:48.000 Within the system of society, there is no conflict of interests as long as the optimum 89 00:09:48.000 --> 00:09:51.860 size of population has not been reached. 90 00:09:51.860 --> 00:09:57.560 As long as the employment of additional hands results in a more than proportionate increase 91 00:09:57.560 --> 00:10:03.840 in the returns, harmony of interests is substituted for conflict. 92 00:10:03.840 --> 00:10:09.040 People are no longer rivals in the struggle for the allocation of portions out of a strictly 93 00:10:09.040 --> 00:10:11.160 limited supply. 94 00:10:11.160 --> 00:10:17.500 They become cooperators in striving after ends common to all of them. 95 00:10:17.500 --> 00:10:23.540 An increase in population figures does not curtail, but rather augments, the average 96 00:10:23.540 --> 00:10:26.860 shares of the individuals. 97 00:10:26.860 --> 00:10:33.040 If men were to strive only after nourishment and sexual satisfaction, population would 98 00:10:33.040 --> 00:10:39.860 tend to increase beyond the optimum size to the limits drawn by the sustenance available. 99 00:10:39.860 --> 00:10:45.380 However, men want more than merely to live and to copulate. 100 00:10:45.380 --> 00:10:48.300 They want to live humanly. 101 00:10:48.300 --> 00:10:55.460 An improvement in conditions usually results, it is true, in an increase in population figures. 102 00:10:55.460 --> 00:11:00.780 But this increase lags behind the increase in bare sustenance. 103 00:11:00.780 --> 00:11:06.940 If it were otherwise, men would never have succeeded in the establishment of social bonds, 104 00:11:06.940 --> 00:11:10.020 and in the development of civilization. 105 00:11:10.020 --> 00:11:16.940 As with rats, mice and microbes, every increase in sustenance would have made population figures 106 00:11:16.940 --> 00:11:20.860 rise to the limits of bare sustenance. 107 00:11:20.860 --> 00:11:24.980 Nothing would have been left for the seeking of other ends. 108 00:11:24.980 --> 00:11:31.120 The fundamental error implied in the iron law of wages was precisely the fact that it 109 00:11:31.120 --> 00:11:37.740 looked upon men, or at least upon the wage earners, as being exclusively driven by animal 110 00:11:37.740 --> 00:11:39.620 impulses. 111 00:11:39.620 --> 00:11:46.020 Its champions failed to realize that man differs from the beasts as far as he aims also at 112 00:11:46.020 --> 00:11:53.580 specifically human ends, which one may call higher or more sublime ends. 113 00:11:53.580 --> 00:11:59.300 The Malthusian law of population is one of the great achievements of thought. 114 00:11:59.300 --> 00:12:04.020 Together with the principle of the division of labor, it provided the foundations for 115 00:12:04.020 --> 00:12:08.160 modern biology and for the theory of evolution. 116 00:12:08.160 --> 00:12:14.120 The importance of these two fundamental theorems for the sciences of human action is second 117 00:12:14.120 --> 00:12:19.800 only to the discovery of the regularity in the intertwinement and sequence of market 118 00:12:19.800 --> 00:12:25.440 phenomena and their inevitable determination by the market data. 119 00:12:25.440 --> 00:12:31.660 The objections raised against the Malthusian law as well as against the law of returns 120 00:12:31.660 --> 00:12:34.380 are vain and trivial. 121 00:12:34.380 --> 00:12:40.640 Both laws are indisputable, but the role to be assigned to them within the body of the 122 00:12:40.640 --> 00:12:47.600 sciences of human action is different from that which Malthus attributed to them. 123 00:12:47.600 --> 00:12:53.200 Non-human beings are entirely subject to the operation of the biological law described 124 00:12:53.200 --> 00:12:55.200 by Malthus. 125 00:12:55.200 --> 00:13:01.200 The Malthusian law is, of course, a biological and not a praxeological law. 126 00:13:01.200 --> 00:13:11.200 However, its cognizance is indispensable for praxeology in order to conceive by contrast the essential characteristic of human action. 127 00:13:11.200 --> 00:13:18.200 As the natural sciences failed to discover it, the economists had to fill the gap. 128 00:13:18.200 --> 00:13:30.200 The history of the law of population, too, explodes the popular myth about the backwardness of the sciences of human action and their need to borrow from the natural sciences. 129 00:13:30.200 --> 00:13:46.200 For non-human beings, the statement that their numbers tend to encroach upon the means of subsistence, and that the supernumerary specimens are weeded out by want of sustenance, is valid without any exception. 130 00:13:46.200 --> 00:13:55.200 With reference to the non-human animals, the notion of minimum sustenance has an unequivocal, uniquely determined sense. 131 00:13:55.200 --> 00:13:58.200 But the case is different with man. 132 00:13:58.200 --> 00:14:12.200 Man integrates the satisfaction of the purely zoological impulses, common to all animals, into a scale of values, in which a place is also assigned to specifically human ends. 133 00:14:12.200 --> 00:14:18.200 Acting man also rationalizes the satisfaction of his sexual appetites. 134 00:14:18.200 --> 00:14:24.200 Their satisfaction is the outcome of a weighing of pros and cons. 135 00:14:24.200 --> 00:14:37.200 Man does not blindly submit to a sexual stimulation like a bull, he refrains from copulation if he deems the costs, the anticipated disadvantages, too high. 136 00:14:37.200 --> 00:14:48.200 In this sense, we may, without any valuation or ethical connotation, apply the term moral restraint employed by Malthus. 137 00:14:48.200 --> 00:14:55.160 Rationalization of sexual intercourse already involves the rationalization of proliferation. 138 00:14:55.160 --> 00:15:01.820 Then, later, further methods of rationalizing the increase of progeny were adopted, which 139 00:15:01.820 --> 00:15:06.160 were independent of abstention from copulation. 140 00:15:06.160 --> 00:15:12.400 People resorted to the egregious and repulsive practices of exposing or killing infants, 141 00:15:12.400 --> 00:15:13.880 and of abortion. 142 00:15:13.880 --> 00:15:21.160 Finally, they learn to perform the sexual act in such a way that no pregnancy results. 143 00:15:21.160 --> 00:15:26.780 In the last hundred years, the technique of contraceptive devices has been perfected, and 144 00:15:26.780 --> 00:15:31.080 the frequency of their employment increased considerably. 145 00:15:31.080 --> 00:15:35.720 Yet the procedures had long been known and practiced. 146 00:15:35.720 --> 00:15:42.060 The wealth that modern capitalism bestows upon the broad masses of the capitalist countries, 147 00:15:42.060 --> 00:15:47.680 The improvement in hygienic conditions and therapeutical and prophylactic methods brought 148 00:15:47.680 --> 00:15:55.020 about by capitalism have considerably reduced mortality, especially infant mortality, and 149 00:15:55.020 --> 00:15:59.100 prolonged the average duration of life. 150 00:15:59.100 --> 00:16:04.940 Today in these countries the restriction in generating offspring can succeed only if it 151 00:16:04.940 --> 00:16:08.660 is more drastic than in earlier ages. 152 00:16:08.660 --> 00:16:14.680 The transition to capitalism, that is, the removal of the obstacles which in former days 153 00:16:14.680 --> 00:16:21.500 had fettered the functioning of private initiative and enterprise, has consequently deeply influenced 154 00:16:21.500 --> 00:16:23.800 sexual customs. 155 00:16:23.800 --> 00:16:29.220 It is not the practice of birth control that is new, but merely the fact that it is more 156 00:16:29.220 --> 00:16:32.580 frequently resorted to. 157 00:16:32.580 --> 00:16:37.420 Especially new is the fact that the practice is no longer limited to the upper strata of 158 00:16:37.420 --> 00:16:42.140 of the population, but is common to the whole population. 159 00:16:42.140 --> 00:16:48.460 For it is one of the most important social effects of capitalism that it deproletarianizes 160 00:16:48.460 --> 00:16:51.240 all strata of society. 161 00:16:51.240 --> 00:16:56.780 It raises the standard of living of the masses of the manual workers to such a height that 162 00:16:56.780 --> 00:17:04.580 they too turn into bourgeois and think and act like well-to-do burgers, eager to preserve 163 00:17:04.580 --> 00:17:17.620 With the spread and progress of capitalism, birth control becomes a universal practice. 164 00:17:17.620 --> 00:17:24.420 The transition to capitalism is thus accompanied by two phenomena, a decline both in fertility 165 00:17:24.420 --> 00:17:27.660 rates and in mortality rates. 166 00:17:27.660 --> 00:17:32.500 The average duration of life is prolonged. 167 00:17:32.500 --> 00:17:37.860 In the days of Malthus it was not yet possible to observe these demographical characteristics 168 00:17:37.860 --> 00:17:45.620 of capitalism. Today, it is no longer permissible to question them. But, blinded by romantic 169 00:17:45.620 --> 00:17:52.780 prepossessions, many describe them as phenomena of decline and degeneration peculiar only 170 00:17:52.780 --> 00:18:00.380 to the white-skinned peoples of Western civilization, grown old and decrepit. These romantics are 171 00:18:00.380 --> 00:18:05.860 are seriously alarmed by the fact that the Asiatics do not practice birth control to 172 00:18:05.860 --> 00:18:12.780 the same extent to which it is practiced in Western Europe, North America and Australia. 173 00:18:12.780 --> 00:18:18.260 As modern methods of fighting and preventing disease have brought about a drop in mortality 174 00:18:18.260 --> 00:18:24.620 rates with these Oriental peoples too, their population figures grow more rapidly than 175 00:18:24.620 --> 00:18:27.340 those of the Western nations. 176 00:18:27.340 --> 00:18:34.500 People not the indigenies of India, Malaya, China and Japan, who themselves did not contribute 177 00:18:34.500 --> 00:18:40.660 to the technological and therapeutical achievements of the West, but received them as an unexpected 178 00:18:40.660 --> 00:18:47.060 present? In the end, by the sheer superiority of their numbers, squeeze out the peoples 179 00:18:47.060 --> 00:18:55.620 of European descent? These fears are groundless. Historical experience shows that all Caucasian 180 00:18:55.620 --> 00:19:01.500 and Peoples reacted to the drop in mortality figures brought about by capitalism with a 181 00:19:01.500 --> 00:19:08.260 drop in the birth rate. Of course, from such historical experience, no general law may 182 00:19:08.260 --> 00:19:15.980 be deduced. But praxeological reflection demonstrates that there exists between these two phenomena 183 00:19:15.980 --> 00:19:23.100 a necessary concatenation. An improvement in the external conditions of well-being makes 184 00:19:23.100 --> 00:19:29.780 It is possible a corresponding increase in population figures. However, if the additional 185 00:19:29.780 --> 00:19:36.020 quantity of the means of sustenance is completely absorbed by rearing an additional number of 186 00:19:36.020 --> 00:19:43.260 people, nothing is left for a further improvement in the standard of living. The march of civilization 187 00:19:43.260 --> 00:19:48.760 is arrested. Mankind reaches a state of stagnation. 188 00:19:48.760 --> 00:19:54.380 The case becomes still more obvious if we assume that a prophylactic invention is made 189 00:19:54.380 --> 00:20:00.400 by a lucky chance, and that its practical application requires neither a considerable 190 00:20:00.400 --> 00:20:05.640 investment of capital nor considerable current expenditure. 191 00:20:05.640 --> 00:20:12.060 Of course, modern medical research, and still more, its utilization, absorb huge amounts 192 00:20:12.060 --> 00:20:14.240 of capital and labor. 193 00:20:14.240 --> 00:20:17.040 They are products of capitalism. 194 00:20:17.040 --> 00:20:22.520 They would never have come into existence in a non-capitalist environment. 195 00:20:22.520 --> 00:20:27.600 But there were, in earlier days, instances of a different character. 196 00:20:27.600 --> 00:20:34.700 The practice of smallpox inoculation did not originate from expensive laboratory research, 197 00:20:34.700 --> 00:20:40.280 and in its original crude form could be applied at trifling costs. 198 00:20:40.280 --> 00:20:46.700 Now what would the results of smallpox inoculation have been if its practice had become general 199 00:20:46.700 --> 00:21:12.580 Conditions in Asia and Africa are, by and large, the same. These backward peoples receive 200 00:21:12.580 --> 00:21:19.120 the devices for fighting and preventing disease ready-made from the West. Often they are 201 00:21:19.120 --> 00:21:25.100 not even charged for the drugs, the hospital equipment and the services of the doctors. 202 00:21:25.100 --> 00:21:31.420 The whites defray the costs, sometimes out of humanitarian considerations, sometimes 203 00:21:31.420 --> 00:21:37.740 impelled by their own interests. It is true that in some of these countries imported foreign 204 00:21:37.740 --> 00:21:42.980 Human capital and the adoption of foreign technological methods by the comparatively 205 00:21:42.980 --> 00:21:49.980 small domestic capital synchronously tend to increase the per capita output of labor 206 00:21:49.980 --> 00:21:54.860 and thus to bring about a tendency toward an improvement in the average standard of 207 00:21:54.860 --> 00:21:55.860 living. 208 00:21:55.860 --> 00:22:02.620 However, this does not sufficiently counterbalance the opposite tendency resulting from the drop 209 00:22:02.620 --> 00:22:09.620 The Reformers of the Oriental Peoples want to secure for the future of the world the 210 00:22:32.620 --> 00:22:38.620 are their fellow citizens the material well-being that the Western nations enjoy. 211 00:22:38.620 --> 00:22:46.620 Deluded by Marxian, nationalist and militarist ideas, they think that all that is needed for the attainment of this end 212 00:22:46.620 --> 00:22:51.620 is the introduction of European and American technology. 213 00:22:51.620 --> 00:22:59.620 Neither the Slavonic Bolsheviks and nationalists nor their sympathizers in the Indies, in China and in Japan 214 00:22:59.620 --> 00:23:12.620 They realize that what their peoples need most is not Western technology, but the social order, which, in addition to other achievements, has generated this technological knowledge. 215 00:23:12.620 --> 00:23:24.620 They lack, first of all, economic freedom and private initiative, entrepreneurs and capitalism, but they look only for engineers and machines. 216 00:23:24.620 --> 00:23:29.340 What separates East and West is the social and economic system. 217 00:23:29.340 --> 00:23:34.740 The East is foreign to the Western spirit that has created capitalism. 218 00:23:34.740 --> 00:23:40.620 It is of no use to import the paraphernalia of capitalism without admitting capitalism 219 00:23:40.620 --> 00:23:42.580 as such. 220 00:23:42.580 --> 00:23:48.260 No achievement of capitalist civilization would have been accomplished in a non-capitalistic 221 00:23:48.260 --> 00:23:55.060 environment or can be preserved in a world without a market economy. 222 00:23:55.060 --> 00:24:00.380 If the Asiatics really enter into the orbit of Western civilization, they will have to 223 00:24:00.380 --> 00:24:05.060 adopt the market economy without reservations. 224 00:24:05.060 --> 00:24:11.140 Then their masses will rise above their present proletarian wretchedness and practice birth 225 00:24:11.140 --> 00:24:15.880 control as it is practiced in every capitalistic country. 226 00:24:15.880 --> 00:24:22.120 No excessive growth of population will longer hinder the improvement in the standards of 227 00:24:22.120 --> 00:24:23.400 living. 228 00:24:23.400 --> 00:24:28.840 But if the Oriental peoples in the future can find themselves to mechanical reception 229 00:24:28.840 --> 00:24:34.540 of the tangible achievements of the West, without embracing its basic philosophy and 230 00:24:34.540 --> 00:24:42.680 social ideologies, they will forever remain in their present state of inferiority and destitution. 231 00:24:42.680 --> 00:24:50.280 Their populations may increase considerably, but they will not raise themselves above distress. 232 00:24:50.280 --> 00:24:56.220 These miserable masses of paupers will certainly not be a serious menace to the independence 233 00:24:56.220 --> 00:24:58.420 of the Western nations. 234 00:24:58.420 --> 00:25:03.780 As long as there is a need for weapons, the entrepreneurs of the market society will never 235 00:25:03.780 --> 00:25:10.320 stop producing more efficient weapons, and thus securing to their countrymen a superiority 236 00:25:10.320 --> 00:25:16.420 of Equipment over the merely imitative non-capitalistic orientals. 237 00:25:16.420 --> 00:25:22.400 The military events of both world wars have proved anew that the capitalistic countries 238 00:25:22.400 --> 00:25:26.620 are paramount also in armaments production. 239 00:25:26.620 --> 00:25:33.880 No foreign aggressor can destroy capitalist civilization if it does not destroy itself. 240 00:25:33.880 --> 00:25:39.880 Where capitalistic entrepreneurship is allowed to function freely, the fighting forces will 241 00:25:39.880 --> 00:25:45.600 will always be so well equipped that the biggest armies of the backward peoples will be no 242 00:25:45.600 --> 00:25:47.560 match for them. 243 00:25:47.560 --> 00:25:53.300 There has even been great exaggeration of the danger of making the formulas for manufacturing 244 00:25:53.300 --> 00:25:56.680 secret weapons universally known. 245 00:25:56.680 --> 00:26:02.360 If war comes again, the searching mind of the capitalistic world will always have a 246 00:26:02.360 --> 00:26:08.560 head start on the peoples who merely copy and imitate clumsily. 247 00:26:08.560 --> 00:26:14.160 The peoples who have developed the system of market economy and cling to it are in every 248 00:26:14.160 --> 00:26:18.240 respect superior to all other peoples. 249 00:26:18.240 --> 00:26:23.380 The fact that they are eager to preserve peace is not a mark of their weakness and inability 250 00:26:23.380 --> 00:26:25.240 to wage war. 251 00:26:25.240 --> 00:26:30.880 They love peace because they know that armed conflicts are pernicious and disintegrate 252 00:26:30.880 --> 00:26:33.720 the social division of labor. 253 00:26:33.720 --> 00:26:39.800 But if war becomes unavoidable, they show their superior efficiency in military affairs 254 00:26:39.800 --> 00:26:40.960 too. 255 00:26:40.960 --> 00:26:46.560 They repel the barbarian aggressors, whatever their numbers may be. 256 00:26:46.560 --> 00:26:51.820 The purposive adjustment of the birth rate to the supply of the material potentialities 257 00:26:51.820 --> 00:26:58.960 of well-being is an indispensable condition of human life and action, of civilization, 258 00:26:58.960 --> 00:27:02.960 and of any improvement in wealth and welfare. 259 00:27:02.960 --> 00:27:09.400 Whether the only beneficial method of birth control is abstention from coitus is a question 260 00:27:09.400 --> 00:27:15.800 which must be decided from the point of view of bodily and mental hygiene. It is absurd 261 00:27:15.800 --> 00:27:21.920 to confuse the issue by referring to ethical precepts developed in ages which were faced 262 00:27:21.920 --> 00:27:28.680 with different conditions. However, praxeology is not interested in the theological aspects 263 00:27:28.680 --> 00:27:34.680 of the Problem. It has merely to establish the fact that where there is no limitation 264 00:27:34.680 --> 00:27:40.940 of offspring, there cannot be any question of civilization and improvement in the standard 265 00:27:40.940 --> 00:27:47.660 of living. A socialist commonwealth would be under the necessity of regulating the fertility 266 00:27:47.660 --> 00:27:54.660 rate by authoritarian control. It would have to regiment the sexual life of its wards no 267 00:27:54.660 --> 00:28:01.400 no less than all other spheres of their conduct. In the market economy, every individual is 268 00:28:01.400 --> 00:28:08.260 spontaneously intent upon not begetting children whom he could not rear without considerably 269 00:28:08.260 --> 00:28:14.980 lowering his family standard of life. Thus the growth of population beyond the optimum 270 00:28:14.980 --> 00:28:21.780 size as determined by the supply of capital available and the state of technological knowledge 271 00:28:21.780 --> 00:28:30.340 is checked. The interests of each individual coincide with those of all other individuals. 272 00:28:30.340 --> 00:28:36.380 Those fighting birth control want to eliminate a device indispensable for the preservation 273 00:28:36.380 --> 00:28:42.980 of peaceful human cooperation and the social division of labor. Where the average standard 274 00:28:42.980 --> 00:28:50.160 of living is impaired by the excessive increase in population figures, irreconcilable conflicts 275 00:28:50.160 --> 00:28:59.660 Each individual is again a rival of all other individuals in the struggle for survival. 276 00:28:59.660 --> 00:29:06.060 The annihilation of rivals is the only means of increasing one's own well-being. 277 00:29:06.060 --> 00:29:11.360 The philosophers and theologians who assert that birth control is contrary to the laws 278 00:29:11.360 --> 00:29:17.360 of God and nature refuse to see things as they really are. 279 00:29:17.360 --> 00:29:22.920 Nature straightens the material means required for the improvement of human well-being and 280 00:29:22.920 --> 00:29:24.480 survival. 281 00:29:24.480 --> 00:29:31.280 As natural conditions are, man has only the choice between the pitiless war of each against 282 00:29:31.280 --> 00:29:34.840 each, or social cooperation. 283 00:29:34.840 --> 00:29:42.880 But social cooperation is impossible if people give rein to the natural impulse of proliferation. 284 00:29:42.880 --> 00:29:50.160 In restricting procreation man adjusts himself to the natural conditions of his existence. 285 00:29:50.160 --> 00:29:56.040 The rationalization of the sexual passions is an indispensable condition of civilization 286 00:29:56.040 --> 00:29:58.600 and societal bonds. 287 00:29:58.600 --> 00:30:04.320 Its abandonment would in the long run not increase but decrease the numbers of those 288 00:30:04.320 --> 00:30:11.280 surviving and would render life for everyone as poor and miserable as it was many thousands 289 00:30:11.280 --> 00:30:14.280 as of years ago for our ancestors.