Financial Falacies
A complete history of all the want, misery, crime and
distress brought to the humanity by the means of
financial panics brought about by the suspension of
specie payments and bank failures would fill volumes
with records of untold suffering.
Upon every page would be inscribed the wail of
starving children, the breaking hearts of women,
and the blighting despair which comes to manhood
when the toil of his best years has been swept away
forever.
Humanity has been desolated by what is commonly
termed a financial panic, which has brought ruin and
robbery to hundreds and thousands of its people.
Millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of property
have been consigned to the hands of a receiver and
sacrificed under the sheriff’s hammer. Millions more
have been foreclosed at one-third its real value.
The hard earnings of a lifetime have been swept away,
and the aged and despoiled have found their only solace
in the comforts of a county poorhouse. Men, women and
children have faced starvation for weeks and months,
and then utterly perished within a stone’s throw of
gigantic granaries literally bursting with the golden fruits
of earth. Hundreds, nay, thousands, of self-sustaining
men have been converted into tramps and beggars.
Suicide and crime have been the legitimate offsprings
of these disastrous times.
On the other hand we see a class of individuals who are
always ready and able to take advantage of these
financial conditions, and what becomes one man’s loss
becomes another’s gain. Men so favored double and
quadruple their estates at every turn in the wheel of
fortune until their wealth rolls into millions thus
accumulated. They reap what they did not sow.
They possess what they did not produce. They live
in luxurious idleness upon the wealth which others
have created. They control legislation in favor of
these conditions, and see no wrong in thus exploiting
their fellow-man.
These economic phenomena are occurring every day.
Their frequency have so stupefied our faculties that
we do not grasp the enormity of the crime. Society
has so long lived under these conditions that it has
lost sight of the primal rights of man and does not
recognize that business can be conducted on any
other basic principle.
No thoughtful man or woman can contemplate this
picture so dark, so distressing in all its features, without
feeling that there is some cause for these dire calamities;
for philosophy teaches us that no result can exist without
a cause, and no effect can ever cease until its cause is
removed.
This social problem, this problem of the age, of which
some one has said : happy our generation, if science
sometime gives the key, stands at the very GATES OF
THIS REPUBLIC knocking for a solution, and if the
intelligence of this nineteenth century fails to interpret
it, then disaster and calamity such as we little know must
overtake and engulf the generations of the twentieth.
Hoselita Ikoli
""...even without success,
creative persons find joy
in a job
well done. Learning
for its own sake
is rewarding...
"-- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi"
http://elantratantra.blogspot.com/
----------------------
About the Author
Mary E. Hobart
http://yamaguchy.netfirms.com/7897401/silas/legalized_index.html
A complete history of all the want, misery, crime and
distress brought to the humanity by the means of
financial panics brought about by the suspension of
specie payments and bank failures would fill volumes
with records of untold suffering.
Upon every page would be inscribed the wail of
starving children, the breaking hearts of women,
and the blighting despair which comes to manhood
when the toil of his best years has been swept away
forever.
Humanity has been desolated by what is commonly
termed a financial panic, which has brought ruin and
robbery to hundreds and thousands of its people.
Millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of property
have been consigned to the hands of a receiver and
sacrificed under the sheriff’s hammer. Millions more
have been foreclosed at one-third its real value.
The hard earnings of a lifetime have been swept away,
and the aged and despoiled have found their only solace
in the comforts of a county poorhouse. Men, women and
children have faced starvation for weeks and months,
and then utterly perished within a stone’s throw of
gigantic granaries literally bursting with the golden fruits
of earth. Hundreds, nay, thousands, of self-sustaining
men have been converted into tramps and beggars.
Suicide and crime have been the legitimate offsprings
of these disastrous times.
On the other hand we see a class of individuals who arealways ready and able to take advantage of these
financial conditions, and what becomes one man’s loss
becomes another’s gain. Men so favored double and
quadruple their estates at every turn in the wheel of
fortune until their wealth rolls into millions thus
accumulated. They reap what they did not sow.
They possess what they did not produce. They live
in luxurious idleness upon the wealth which others
have created. They control legislation in favor of
these conditions, and see no wrong in thus exploiting
their fellow-man.
These economic phenomena are occurring every day.
Their frequency have so stupefied our faculties that
we do not grasp the enormity of the crime. Society
has so long lived under these conditions that it has
lost sight of the primal rights of man and does not
recognize that business can be conducted on any
other basic principle.
No thoughtful man or woman can contemplate this
picture so dark, so distressing in all its features, without
feeling that there is some cause for these dire calamities;
for philosophy teaches us that no result can exist without
a cause, and no effect can ever cease until its cause is
removed.
This social problem, this problem of the age, of which
some one has said : happy our generation, if science
sometime gives the key, stands at the very GATES OF
THIS REPUBLIC knocking for a solution, and if the
intelligence of this nineteenth century fails to interpret
it, then disaster and calamity such as we little know must
overtake and engulf the generations of the twentieth.
Hoselita Ikoli
""...even without success,
creative persons find joy
in a job
well done. Learning
for its own sake
is rewarding...
"-- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi"
http://elantratantra.blogspot.com/
----------------------
About the Author
Mary E. Hobart
http://yamaguchy.netfirms.com/7897401/silas/legalized_index.html
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