It is the economic individualism of our existing national system which
inflicts the most serious damage on American individuality; and American
individual achievement in politics and science and the arts will remain
partially impoverished as long as our fellow-countrymen neglect or
refuse systematically to regulate the distribution of wealth in the
national interest. I am aware, of course, that the prevailing American
conviction is absolutely contradictory of the foregoing assertion.
Americans have always associated individual freedom with the unlimited
popular enjoyment of all available economic opportunities. Yet it would
be far more true to say that the popular enjoyment of practically
unrestricted economic opportunities is precisely the condition which
makes for individual bondage. Neither does the bondage which such a
system fastens upon the individual exist only in the case of those
individuals who are victimized by the pressure of unlimited economic
competition. Such victims exist, of course, in large numbers, and they
will come to exist in still larger number hereafter; but hitherto, at
least, the characteristic vice of the American system has not been the
bondage imposed upon its victims.
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