Portal:Capitalism/Selected quote/30

“ I have heard employers say that there was great danger that the masses of the people might become too well educated to be content in their useful and necessary occupations. It has required an effort upon my part to listen to this doctrine with patience. It is all wrong; I give it an unqualified contradiction. The trouble between capital and labour is just in proportion to the ignorance of the employer and the ignorance of the employed. The more intelligent the employer the better, and the more intelligent the employed the better. It is never education, it is never knowledge, that produces collision. It is always ignorance on the part of one or the other of the two forces. Speaking from an experience not inconsiderable, I make this statement. Capital is ignorant of the necessities and the just dues of labour, and labour is ignorant of the necessities and dangers of capital. That is the true origin of friction between them. More knowledge on the part of capital of the good qualities of those that serve it, and some knowledge upon the part of the men of the economic laws which hold the capitalists in their relentless grasp, would obviate most of the difficulties which arise between these two forces, which are indispensably necessary to each other. I hope that those of our men who possess that inestimable prize, the taste for reading, will make it a point to study carefully a few of the fundamental laws from which there is no escape, either on the part of capital or labour. If this library be instrumental in the slightest degree in spreading knowledge in this department, it will have justified its existence. ” — Andrew Carnegie (1835 – 1919)
The Empire of Business , 1902