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Show THE FREEING OF THE EARTH CHOSE rich fellows, munitions makers and others, who brought on the war, according to tho pacifists, what fools they are! They might have sat tight and continued to make money off the warring nations by selling them supplies. They might have continued to loan those nations money and collect the interest. But they forced us into war and now they have to pay heavy income and profit and other taxes. And as the war goes on the taxes will become heavier, while their capital will he diminished in value. Moreover, . while we were not at war we might have gone on building up our foreign trade with countries not at war. The interests that promoted the war appear to have been hoist on their own petard. They were getting theirs nicely while we were out of war, but now they are getting theirs in quite the opposite sense. Of course if the allies lost the war we might have lost the money we loaned them . to carry it on, but now that we are in the war our capitalists have to risk ten or twenty times what they stood to lose before. It is a too common saying that wo' are in the war to make money. Europe was saying a while back that wo stayed out of tho war to make money. I don't see how we are going to make money out of the war to any extent. Wo cannot collect any indemnity from anyone; at least we will not. We have got to pay for our share in the war and for the shares of others, too. Tho profiteers will be increasingly relieved of their profits as those profits are revealed. Five years of war will destroy industry at the present rate of cost of war. Taxes will bo so heavy that industry will not be able to bear up under it. When the tax upon work and production reaches the stage of intolerability, perhaps wo shall begin to tax the wealth that is produced by everybody and engrossed by the few. The country is going to lose money directly by going into the war. Wo shall have a debt in many billions to pay. Who will pay it? Not the producers, when the war shall have opened their eyes. There will be but one way to re- J store industry, by opening up all natural resources to use, by destroying all monopoly mon-opoly in the destruction of land monopoly. The workers of this country and of the world will take care of all the debts by refusing to pay them to men who ( loaned to the nations the money those men never earned. The time will come when the bonds for the war will be paid by taxing the earth out of the private possession of the great money-lenders. For the present, however, the man of small or moderate means can best get his share of the earnings of the earth by joining the bondholders. Investment Invest-ment in bonds by workers is a step towards partial democratization of wealth. Everybody will have to pay the bonds and therefore each man were wise to arrange ar-range that so far as possible his payment shall be made to himself. This is the pragmatic philosophy for all radicals. It is the way to use the winds of the world storm to fill the sails of economic reform and utilize the force to bring the cause of a free earth to snug harbor. Reedy's Mirror. |