LACK OF OCCUPATION FOR MARRIED WOMEN.
[To THE EDITOR OF TRE "SPECTATOR."]
fear the "fixed work fund fallacy," assumed as a truth by your first correspondent, still hinders many women front doing useful work. When a rich woman takes paid work and earns £100, it looks at first as if she were simply depriving some needy toiler of work and pay, Yet the next step is that she spends, or lends to others to spend, £100 more than she could otherwise have spent ; and this, if she directs it wisely, means the creation of useful employment which could not otherwise have been paid for. Thus the employment which she takes with one band she gives back with the other, and the net result is that an additional piece of work is done and the world made a more comfortable place. I do not touch on the danger of underselling by " pocket-money workers," nor on the necessity that the unpaid work of the world should be done by those who are able. I am only concerned to ease scrupulous consciences by reminding them that if a piece of work on its own merits calls for us to do it, it does not cease to be our duty because somebody pays us. —I am, Sir, [Our correspondent's reminder is most useful. Exchange is not only no robbery, but, as Bastiat pointed out in his "Harmonies of Economics," it is "a union of forces,"—i.e., co-operation. Adding to the world's store of wealth can never result in " taking the bread out of other people's mouths." The object of all who desire to diminish poverty should be to increase the number of exchanges, not to diminish them by refusing to work on a punctilio.—En. Spectator.]
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