HOW WE WASTE THREE-FOURTHS OF OUR MONEY
The waste of Nature is great, and seems unavoidable: it is Nature’s way. She is prodigal of time, of material, of life itself; and seems to have unlimited supplies to draw from. But the waste in our human processes is conspicuously absurd. We submit to it because we are not, in general, awake to what is going on.
Recent spasms of civic investigation have revealed to us one large source of waste in the dishonest use of public money. We are taxed more than is necessary to meet expenses in no way essential to good government. Ten per cent is a moderate allowance for this loss.
We waste more largely and less noticeably in carelessness of our natural resources, as is now beginning to be realized. Waste of timber is followed by waste of water, and that by waste of land. The earth’s surface of arable soil is being washed into the ocean at a wholly unnecessary rate, the foundation of all wealth—of our very life on earth—thus slipping away from us unobserved. Every barren, naked hill is a ruined garden; every yellow, muddy river is leaking gold dust from our pockets; every choked harbor is a loss in money. Another ten per cent is scant allowance for this.
The waste of sewage in almost every city so provided, as well as the loss of the same valuable fertilizing material in smaller places, is grotesquely foolish. If we saw a farmer gathering all the material from his stables and cow sheds and throwing it into the sea, we should think he was a fool. We in towns and cities are just as foolish in wholesale waste of what is worth good money to the farmer. The sale of this material by any great city, together with the sale of its garbage, would be a large and steady source of income. At present we pay out large sums for sewage systems to throw away this product, and pay further sums to persons to take away the garbage and other refuse. We then, to accumulate idiocy, pay more large sums to dredge out the harbors we have ourselves obstructed, and furthermore charge ourselves with a heavy death rate and a burden of disease from the effects of the defiled water and poisoned fish—defiled and poisoned by ourselves. Taken altogether this makes another ten per cent. of our wealth wasted. (All these sums are arbitrary, but well below what they would really amount to.)
We pay very heavily to support our public institutions for the defective, crippled and criminal population—in terrible numbers and increasing. Practically all this is pure waste of money—to say nothing of the loss and suffering to humanity. Prisons, hospitals, insane asylums, poor houses, and the like cost the community a prodigious amount.
This is very largely unnecessary. Our criminal population is made—not born! The born criminal belongs in the hospital or asylum. Our crippled and blind are mainly made so by vicious parents—and all that contributes to vice can be avoided. It is a tremendous expense to produce and maintain such a lot of poor human stock—and it is wholly unnecessary—the most utter waste. We will call it another ten per cent.
Our all too numerous diseases with their premature deaths constitute another heavy loss. The waste of human life force in the infant mortality alone is enormous. The cost of medicine, of doctors, of undertakers, of graveyard rents; the loss of services of those prematurely taken from us—all this is a groaning burden of pain and loss amounting easily to another ten per cent.
We lose by fire, unnecessarily, other huge sums—and fire loss is absolute; there is no “come back,” no compensating circumstance. More human life is lost in fighting fire. In this, and in the terrible death roll from accident in mill and mine and railroad, we lose in money more than another ten per cent.
In the foolishness of throat-cutting competition with all its multiplication of plant and service, its interruptions and interference and delay, another ten per cent is gone—and more. In the general inadequacy of our people—low grade people where we might have high grade ones, like poor stock in cows or hens, or poor kinds of corn or wheat instead of first-class varieties, we waste again good ten per cent—and more. Also in the blind, careless assortment of occupation where people work grudgingly at what they do not like we lose largely. The vigorous output of happy, well placed workers would be worth ten per cent. added to our present wealth.
Then comes our method of domestic industry in which we waste forty-three per cent. of the productive labor of the world—and three-fourths of our living expenses.
Put these all together—and every one of them is modestly within the mark—and three-fourths is a small allowance to cover our wastes. Isn’t it time we had a Social Secretary and a Financial Expert to teach us a few things?
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