Reply #103: And Do You Seriously Think, Sir

[The Magistrate]

That in even the majority of those moves and closures the owners were being honest about the matter? You should know perfectly well that was not the case, that the fact was that they simply could not stomach making four or five percent when there seemed a possibility of managing seven or eight percent by some other course. It is not the work of Unions in securing a more equitabe division of the spoils of capitalsit enterprise that is the problem: it is the unwillinmgness of the bosses to abide by a more equitable distribution of those spoils.

The idea that wages are forced beyond what the market will bear is simple nonesense. The periods of greatest prosperity coincide with the periods of highest wage earning: the higher wages are, the more demand there is for products and services, and the more opportunity there is for profitable investment to satisfy that demand. The real problem is that bosses seek to force wages down to match the subsistence level, in the short-sighted view that this will give them personally more, when in fact what it does is reduce economic activity and demand for products and services, and make the over-all business climate worse for every proprietor.