There has always been more
popular interest in the profits of millionaires, which are visible but
comparatively unimportant, than in the wastes of the industrial
system, which are huge but elusive. A legislature dealing with a
shortage of houses, such as exists when this is written, illustrates
this rule, first by doing nothing to increase the number of houses,
second by smiting the greedy landlord on the hip, third by
investigating the profiteering builders and working men. For a
constructive policy deals with remote and uninteresting factors, while
a greedy landlord, or a profiteering plumber is visible and immediate.
But while people will readily believe that in an unimagined future and
in unseen places a certain policy will benefit them, the actual
working out of policy follows a different logic from their opinions. A
nation may be induced to believe that jacking up the freight rates
will make the railroads prosperous. But that belief will not make the
roads prosperous, if the impact of those rates on farmers and shippers
is such as to produce a commodity price beyond what the consumer can
pay. Whether the consumer will pay the price depends not upon whether
he nodded his head nine months previously at the proposal to raise
rates and save business, but on whether he now wants a new hat or a
new automobile enough to pay for them.
3
Leaders often pretend that they have merely uncovered a program which
existed in the minds of their public.
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