hey fix their minds on some man or group of men whose case
appeals to the sympathies and the imagination, and they plan remedies
addressed to the particular trouble; they do not understand that all
the parts of society hold together, and that forces which are set in
action act and react throughout the whole organism, until an
equilibrium is produced by a readjustment of all interests and rights.
They therefore ignore entirely the source from which they must draw all
the energy which they employ in their remedies, and they ignore all the
effects on other members of society than the ones they have in view.
They are always under the dominion of the superstition of government,
and, forgetting that a government produces nothing at all, they leave
out of sight the first fact to be remembered in all social
discussion--that the State cannot get a cent for any man without taking
it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced
and saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man.

The friends of humanity start out with certain benevolent feelings
toward "the poor," "the weak," "the laborers," and others of whom they
make pets. They generalize these classes, and render them impersonal,
and so constitute the classes into social pets. They turn to other
classes and appeal to sympathy and generosity, and to all the other
noble sentiments of the human heart. Action in the line proposed
consists in a transfer of capital from the better off to the worse off.
Capital, however, as we have seen, is the force by which civilization
is maintained and carried on. The same piece of capital cannot be used
in two ways. Every bit of capital, therefore, which is given to a
shiftless and inefficient member of society, who makes no return for
it, is diverted from a reproductive use; but if it was put to
reproductive use, it would have to be granted in wages to an efficient
and productive laborer. Hence the real sufferer by that kind of
benevolence which consists in an expenditure of capital to protect the
good-for-nothing is the industrious laborer. The latter, however, is
never thought of in this connection. It is assumed that he is provided
for and out of the account. Such a notion only shows how little true
notions of political economy have as yet become popularized. There is
an almost invincible prejudice that a man who gives a dollar to a
beggar is generous and kind-hearted, but that a man who refuses the
beggar and puts the dol