| |
toiling, but are as poor as any. If labor could produce wealth, the whole world would have been rolling in wealth. The producer of wealth is someone else. He is the entrepreneur -- the creative talent behind capitalism. Capitalism gave opportunity to such talent to produce, organize and manage wealth. Capitalism is organized production on a mass scale.
The great change which capitalism made was that it substituted manual labor with machines. Because man's labor cannot produce wealth. However hard his hands toil, they cannot produce enough even to fill his stomach.
In the time of Buddha, the entire population of India was twenty millions. And this population could not have been bigger than this, because nine out of ten children had to die for lack of food, medicines and housing. There was no way to save them. But during the last hundred and fifty years, a tremendous thing happened; it is called the population-explosion. Today there are three and a half billion people on our planet. Three and a half billion people are alive today, only because of capitalism. Without it they would have perished. It was unthinkable in the times before capitalism that this planet could maintain such a huge population. What did capitalism do?
First, it replaced man with the machine; it introduced technology. It freed man from labor and engaged the machine. This in its turn had two results. The capacity of the machine is limitless; man's capacity is very limited. What one machine can do in a day will need tens of thousands of men, even millions, to do with their hands. It is because of the machine that the phenomenon of mass production was possible. With the machine began the enormous stockpiling of wealth in the world.
And secondly, with the advent of the machine man became free -- free from slavery. The end of serfdom. liquidation of slavery, was another gift of capitalism to mankind. Had not the machine come into being slavery would never have ended. It was impossible to banish serfdom and slavery without the machine. Without the machine man would have had to remain in bondage because then he was bound to be forced to work, whipped to work hard. For without
|
|
|