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What Social Classes Owe to Each Other  (1883)

William Graham Sumner -

 So far I can find out what the classes are who are respectively endowed with the rights and duties of posing and solving social problems, they are as follows:  Those who are bound to solve the problems are the rich, comfortable, prosperous, virtuous, respectable, educated, and healthy; those whose right it is to set  the problems are those who have been less fortunate or less successful in the struggle for existence.  The problem itself seems to be, How shall the latter be made as comfortable as the former?  To solve this problem, and make us all equally well off, is assumed to be the duty of the former class; the penalty, if they fail of this, is to be bloodshed and destruction.  If they cannot make everybody else as well off as themselves, they are to be brought down to the same misery as others. 

During the last ten years I have read a great many books and articles, especially by German writers, in which an attempt has been made to set up "the State" as an entity having conscience, power, and will sublimated above human limitations, and as constituting a tutelary genius over us all.  I have never been able to find in history or experience anything to fit this concept....

...The inadequacy of the State to regulative tasks is agreed upon, as a matter of fact, by all.   Why, then, bring State regulation into the discussion simply in order to throw it out again?  The whole subject ought to be discussed and settled aside from the hypothesis of State regulation....

It is commonly asserted that there are in the United States no classes, and any allusion to classes is resented.  On the other hand, we constantly read and hear discussions of social topics in which the existence of social classes is assumed as a simple fact.   "The poor,"  "the weak," "the laborers," are expressions which are used as if they had exact and well-understood definition.  Discussions are made to bear upon the assumed rights, wrongs, and misfortunes of certain social classes; and all public speaking and writing consists, in a large measure, of the discussion of general plans for meeting the wishes of classes of people who have not been able to satisfy their own desires....

Now, if there are groups of people who have a claim to other people's labor and self-denial, and if there are other people whose labor and self-denial are liable to be claimed by the first groups, then there certainly are "classes,"  and classes of the oldest and most vicious type.  For a man who can command another man's labor and self-denial for the support of his own existence is a privileged person of the highest species conceivable on earth.... We shall find that every effort to realize equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty....

...A man who is present as a consumer, yet who does not contribute either by land, labor, or capital to the work of society, is a burden.  On no sound political theory ought such a person to share in the political power of the State.   He drops out of the ranks of workers and producers.  Society must support him.  It accepts the burden, but he must be cancelled from the ranks of the rulers likewise.   So much for the pauper.   About him no more need be said....

...[T]hose who humanitarians and philanthropists call weak are the ones through whom the productive and conservative forces of society are wasted.  They constantly neutralize and destroy the finest efforts of the wise and industrious, and are a dead-weight on the society in all its struggles to realize any better things. Whether the people who mean no harm, but are weak in the essential powers necessary to the performance of one's duties in life, of those who are malicious and vicious, do the more mischief, is a question not easy to answer.

Under the names of poor and the weak, the negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent are fastened upon the industrious and prudent as a responsibility and a duty....

The humanitarians, philanthropists and reformers, looking at the facts of life as they present themselves, find enough which is sad and unpromising in the consideration they forget all about the rights of other classes;  they gloss over all the faults of the classes in question, and they exaggerate their misfortunes and their virtues.... The man who has done nothing to raise himself above poverty finds that the social doctors flock about him,  bringing the capital which they have collected from the other class, and promising him the aid of the State to give him what the other had to work for.  In all these schemes and projects the organized intervention of society through the State is either planned or hoped for, and the State is thus made to become the protector and guardian of certain classes.  The agents who are to direct the State action are, of course, the reformers and philanthropists.... Here it may suffice to observe that, on the theories of the social philosophers to whom I have referred, we should get a new maxim of judicious living: Poverty is the best policy.  If you  get wealth you will have to support other people;  if you do not get wealth, it will be the duty of other people to support you....

Every man and woman in society has one big duty.  That is, to take care of his or own self....

Society, therefore, does not need any care of supervision.  It we can acquire a science of  society, based on observation of phenomena and study of forces, we may hope to gain some ground slowly toward the elimination of old errors and the re-establishment of a sound and natural social order.  Whatever we gain that way will be by growth, never in the world by any reconstruction of society on the plan of some enthusiastic social architect.... Society needs first of all to be freed from these meddlers----that is, to be let alone.  Here we are, then, once more back at the old doctrine---- Laissez faire.  Let us translate it  into blunt English, and it will read, Mind your own business.  It is nothing but the doctrine of liberty....

source: William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (New York, 1903), pp 8-9, 11, 13, 15-16, 20-24, 113, 119-120.