This American chaos of released human energies has been going on for little more than a century, less than half of this country’s past history. In that time it has created America and made America the richest country in the world. Where has this wealth come from?

Only once have any large number of Americans wanted to distribute wealth, and they did not intend to raise the standard of living. The standard of living had already risen too high and crashed too deplorably. They wanted to return to the prosperity of the 80’s.

This happened forty years ago. I remember it well. Hard times had ended forever an age of enormous expansion in finance, invention and wealth. Within the memory of my parents, who were not old, living conditions had been utterly transformed.

The telephone, the electric light, the silk stocking, fresh vegetables and fruits in winter, sanitary meat markets, the ice box, and the milk bottle, the gas range and the kerosene cookstove, ready-made clothes, the seamless sheet, wall paper the toothbrush, the leather shoe, moving pictures, ice cream, and a thousand other things to which Americans are so accustomed that we do not see them, all testify to such a distribution of wealth in this individualistic country as no other people have dreamed of enjoying.

We look too much at charts and statistics. We would learn more by looking at America.

Oddly enough, statistics appear only in times of agitation and distress. Their function would appear to be that of omens of worse to come. We seem to have a morbid taste for them, like that of children for ghost stories that raise the hair. The American air has not been so full of fragmentary statistics since the Panic of 1893.

There is nothing new in planned and controlled economy. Human beings have lived under various forms of that social security for six thousand years. The new thing is the anarchy of individualism, which has been operating freely only in this country for a century and a half.

Ten years ago I wrote: The test comes now.

Americans were singing, “Happy Days are here again!” Dorothy Thompson published I Saw Hitler, reporting that the little man was a false alarm because his illogical program could not influence the logical German mind, and to me she exclaimed exultantly, “Rose! we’re actually seeing the end of capitalism!” American capitalists quickly made her America’s favorite oracle.

Why Wages Rise

F. A. HARPER

THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION, INC.
IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK1957

Copyright 1957 by F. A. HARPER

Permission to reproduce from this book, without special request, is hereby granted by both the author and publisher. Information about uses will be appreciated.

Library of Congress Catalogue Card No.: 57-6929.

PRINTED IN U.S.A.

WAGES AND UNION MEMBERSHIP

CHANGES IN PRODUCTIVITY AND WAGE RATES

ENERGY OUTPUT

REAL AND UNREAL WAGE RATES

WAGE TRENDS: BUYING POWER BEFORE AND AFTER TAXES

LEISURE AND BETTER LIVING

EFFECTS OF PRICE FREEDOM

WAGE LEVEL AND UNEMPLOYMENT

UNEMPLOYMENT; SHARES OF NATIONAL INCOME

INSTABILITY OF BUSINESS