Amongst the means destructionist policy has employed, the legal protection of labour is, in its direct effects, the most harmless. Yet this aspect of social policy is specially important as an outcome of destructionist thought.

The essence of the programme of German etatism is social insurance. But people outside the German Empire have also come to look upon social insurance as the highest point to which the insight of the statesman and political wisdom can attain. If some praise the wonderful results of these institutions, others can only reproach them for not going far enough, for not including all classes and for not giving the favoured all that, in their opinion, they should have.

The fundamental problem for the appreciation of the economic and social consequences of trade unionism is the question whether labour can succeed, within a market economy, by association and by collective bargaining, in getting high wages lastingly and for all workers. To this question, economic theory — both the classic (including its marxist wing), and the modern (including its socialist wing too) — answers categorically in the negative.

Assistance of the unemployed has proved to be one of the most effective weapons of destructionism.

Under Liberalism, state-owned factories and production by the State were abolished. The postal service was practically the only exception to the general principle that the means of production should be left to private ownership and every economic activity made over to the private citizen. The advocates of etatism have gone to a lot of trouble to set forth the reasons which they suppose to favour the nationalization of the postal and the related telegraph service. In the first place they put forward political arguments.

For classical nineteenth-century Liberalism, which assigns to the State the sole task of safeguarding the citizen’s property and person, the problem of raising the means needed for public services is a matter of small importance. The expenditure caused by the apparatus of a liberal community is so small, compared with the total national income, that there is little appreciable difference between meeting it one way or another.

Inflation is the last word in destructionism. The Bolshevists, with their inimitable gift for rationalizing their resentments and interpreting defeats as victories, have represented their financial policy as an effort to abolish Capitalism by destroying the institution of money. But although inflation does indeed destroy Capitalism, it does not do away with private property.

Socialism has not consciously willed the destruction of society. It believed it was creating a higher form of society. But since a socialist society is not a possibility every step towards it must destroy society.