Ethics and Economics 
77 
We shall see how, by political means, we are rob- 
bing ourselves of the very things that are offered to 
us by the politicians. 
The problem can be stated in plain, unvarnished 
terms in a few sentences. We are suffering from a 
surplus of labour and a shortage of wealth. In 
these circumstances we all of us devote the major 
part of our energies to the quest for new ways of 
limiting, restricting, regulating, and restraining the 
individual actions of man and the production of 
wealth, with the natural result that the surplus of 
labour gets greater and the shortage of wealth gets 
more acute. If we reverse our policy, dismiss 
politics from our minds; and all of us dedicate our- 
selves to activity and the production of wealth, we 
could arrive, and arrive very quickly, at a condition 
of affairs in which there was a shortage of labour 
and a surplus of wealth. The economic condition 
of the world could be changed completely were we 
but willing to understand that it is the absence of 
things which produces poverty. So long as we 
insist upon making the production of things more 
and more difficult it is not only useless but stupid to 
complain of poverty.