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<font color="#002864" size="1" face="Verdana">http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1306</font>
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<font face="Verdana" size="2"><font color="#002864" size="5"><strong>Sumner's Forgotten Classic</strong></font>
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<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="4">By Christopher
Mayer</font>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">[Posted
September 5, 2003]</font>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">"History
is only a tiresome repetition of one story."</font> <font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">-William
Graham Sumner</font>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2"><img alt src="http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/photos/assets/photos/1053.jpg" align="right" border="0" width="208" height="265">Sumner
was referring to the seemingly endless attempts to harness the power of the
State to further one's own ends at the expense of other people. All
human types—generals, millionaires, priests, scholars and so on—have made
these attempts. The disease is not confined by race, color or creed, by
age or occupation, by democracy or dictatorship. All of it makes little
difference. The desire to live at the expense of other men is a constant
theme that runs through all of human history.</font>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">In a tightly
argued book written in 1883 titled What
Social Classes Owe To Each Other, Sumner packed penetrating observations
about the nature of political relations, and the incessant struggle of power
against liberty. Of particular interest too, is Sumner's widely known (but
not as widely understood) concept of the Forgotten Man. Also central to
the thesis of the book is Sumner's acute understanding of the role of capital
in the toil of everyday life and its role in improving the standard of living.</font>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">In so many
ways, the essential intellectual tussles of his day were similar to those we
face today. The dragons that Sumner sought to slay are still threatening
civilization. There are still those who think that you can get something
for nothing, and the primary agent for such legerdemain is always government—an
illusory horn of plenty. </font>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica">Throughout Sumner's
book he emphasizes that the very nature of mankind's existence entails a
struggle against the tireless and ever-encroaching powers of nature, a theme
later libertarians such as Rose Wilder Lane (in her classic The Discovery
of Freedom) would echo. The facts of our existence include much
effort just to maintain a standard of living, as the Red Queen in Lewis
Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, seemed to appreciate when she said,
"It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place!"
This is just the way things are. We have to work to feed ourselves and
meet other basic necessities of life, and if we don't then someone must do it
for us. "We cannot get a revision of the laws of human life,"
Sumner notes. These basics are sometimes taken for granted, especially in the
relatively rich countries of the West, as if they were always there and will
always be there. </font>
<p class="MsoBodyText" align="left"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica">Sumner
made an important distinction, though, about the nature of the struggle.
"Certain ills belong to the hardships of human life. They are
natural. They are part of the struggle with Nature for existence.
We cannot blame our fellow-men for our share of these.... Certain other
ills are due to the malice of men, and to the imperfections or errors of civil
institutions." </font>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">The problems
of old age, for example, are just a natural part of being human.
Moreover, we all develop certain skills, are imbued with certain gifts and
temperaments, and are born into different families in different geographical
areas. All of these factors assure that each of us will deal with
nature's challenges with varying degrees of success.</font>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">Other problems,
like the burdens of chronic inflation, are the results of misplaced confidence
in fiat currencies and the ability of governments to manage them. Many
of these problems are foisted on the Forgotten Man. Look at the
healthcare debate, where various proposals are put forth for the government to
pay or subsidize medical costs. The politicians and policy wonks get all
the attention, as do the alleged beneficiaries of their programs, but no
attention is paid to the folks who have to pay for it all—Sumner's Forgotten
Men. As Sumner writes,"In all the discussions attention is
concentrated on A and B, the noble social reformers, and on D, the 'poor man'.
I call C the Forgotten Man, because I have never seen that any notice was
taken of him in any of these discussions."</font>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">The Forgotten
Men are those who work and save and otherwise mind their own business.
Whatever the government spends, it can do that only by"... taking it
from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved
it. This latter is the Forgotten Man."</font>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">But it is upon
the backs of such men that civilization advances and the standard of living is
raised. Sumner understood that capital was the building block of
civilization. In an eloquent passage, Sumner explains the role of
capital in the advancing mankind beyond the status of brutes:</font>
<blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<p class="MsoBodyText" align="left"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica">"Every
step of capital won made the next step possible, up to the present hour.
Not a step has been or can be made without capital. It is labor
accumulated, multiplied unto itself—raised to a higher power.... The
locomotive is only possible today because, from the flint-knife up, one
achievement has been multiplied into another through thousands of
generations.... We cannot build a school, a hospital, a church, or
employ a missionary society, without capital, any more than we could build a
palace or a factory without capital. We have ourselves, and we
have the earth; the thing which limits what we can do is the third requisite—capital.
... We get so used to it that we do not see its use."</font>
[/i]
<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">Given
capital's importance, you would think we would adopt attitudes and practices
that encouraged and promoted the creation of capital. Instead, our
government spends and borrows with no thought to the destructive consequences
of their indulgences. Voters and lobbyists continue to push for more and
the Forgotten Men are filched of their hard-earned wealth.</font>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">Many negative
attitudes still prevail about wealth and the wealthy—the great accumulators
of capital. Sumner will have none of it, offering a very simple
explanation for the general wealth of industry's leaders."Men of routine
or men who can do what they are told are not hard to find; but men who can
think and plan and tell the routine men what to do are very rare. They
are paid in proportion to the supply and demand of them."
Creativity, leadership qualities and other skills are paid in proportion to
the old forces of supply and demand. The same analysis could be applied
to businesses as a whole, where those businesses whose services or products
are in high demand are paid well and become wealthy, and others, such as
American steel manufacturers, agricultural producers and airlines seem to
always be on the verge of disaster.</font>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">Going after
the successful individuals or placing limits or penalties on accumulating
wealth are shown to be the work of sheer folly, likened to"killing off
our generals in war," as Sumner points out. </font>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">For Sumner,
society needs no supervision imposed upon it by force and each man ought to be
free to seek happiness in his own way. As a result, the only reforms
Sumner advocated were those that would undo the work of the statesmen of the
past. Sumner advised,"If the social doctors will mind their own
business, we should have no troubles but what belongs to Nature. Those
we will endure or combat as we can. What we desire is, that the friends
of humanity should cease to add to them."</font>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">Sumner
cherished liberty and concluded, as did Lord Acton and others, that liberty
was not a means to social ends. Sumner wrote,"All institutions are
to be tested by the degree to which they guarantee liberty. It is not to
be admitted for a moment that liberty is a means to social ends, and that it
may be impaired for major considerations." Too often today's
leaders are quick to surrender liberties for mere trifles, and the population
at large allows it to happen.</font>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">It may seem
odd that a man writing at the tail end of the 19<sup>th</sup> century should
have anything to teach us as we sit here in the opening years of the 21<sup>st</sup>
century. However, timeless insights like Sumner's never grow obsolete.
Today our government continues to play judge and jury with the fruits of other
men's labors and many people think nothing of it. The Forgotten Men are
still forgotten. Capital is still underappreciated or else confused with
things that are not capital, such as Greenspan's waterfalls of credit.
William Graham Sumner's ideas remain relevant today—painfully so.</font>
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<p class="MsoBodyText"></font><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">Christopher
Mayer is a commercial lender for Provident Bank in the suburbs of Washington,
D.C. Send him </font> <font face="Verdana, Helvetica" color="#000080" size="2">MAIL</font><font face="Verdana, Helvetica" color="#000000" size="2"> and
see his Mises.org
Articles Archive.
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