Like...helping people ? Consider: majoring in, Psychology

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Like...helping people ? Consider: majoring in, Psychology

it became necessary to proceed cautiously with the etatistic policy. The embarrhiment in which economists writing on these problems found themselves became evident from their reluctance to ascribe the financial failure of public enterprises to the uneconomic methods of this kind of enterprise. They tried instead to account for it by some special circumstance, such as personal mistakes in the management and errors in organization. And they pointed repeatedly to the Prussian State railways as the most brilliant model of a good administration. Of course the Prussian State railways have yielded good working surpluses. But there were special reasons. Prussia acquired the most important part of its State railway system in the first half of the 'eighties, that was at a time of specially low prices, and the whole system was equipped and expanded to a large extent before the rapid growth of German industrial prosperity which set in during the second half of the 'nineties. Thus there was nothing particularly remarkable in the fact that these railways paid well, for their loads grew from year to year without any solicitation, they ran mostly through plains, they had coal on every hand, and could count on favourable running conditions. Their situation was such that they could yield profits for a while although run by the State. It was the same with the gas, water, and electricity works and with the tramway systems of several large cities. The conclusions generally drawn from this were, however, far from accurate. Generally speaking, the result of nationalization and municipalization was that taxation had to contribute to running his. so it may be said that no catchword has ever been made public at so inappropriate a moment as Goldscheid's slogan of "the suppressionof the taxation state." Goldscheid thinks that the financial troubles intowhich the World War and its consequences have landed the State can no longer be remedied by the old methods of public finance. The taxation of private enterprise is failing. Therefore, one must start to "repropriate" the State by expropriating capitalist enterprises, so that the State will be able to cover its expenses out of the profits of its own undertakings.22 Here we have the cart before the horse. The financial difficulties result from the fact that taxation can no longer hi the large contributions required by socialist enterprises. Were all enterprises socialized, the form of the evil would indeed be changed, but far from being abolished it would be intensified. The smaller yield of the public enterprises would no longer be visible in a budget deficit, it is true, but the population would be worse off. Distress and misery would increase, not diminish. To remove the State's financial troubles Goldscheid proposes to carry socialization to the bitter end. But this financial trouble has come about because socialization has already gone too far. It will vanish only when socialized enterprises are returned to private ownership. Socialism has arrived at a point where the impossibility of carrying out its technique is apparent to all, where even the blind begin to see that it is hastening the decline of all civilization. The effort made in Central Europe to socialize completely at a single stroke was wrecked not by the resistance of the bourgeoisie, but by the fact [318] that further socialization was quite impossible from a financial point of view. The systematic, cool and deliberate socialization .