Carver Encourages College Students To Make Jobs for Selves When Employment is Lacking

"College men should make jobs, not seek them," said Dr. Thomas N. Carvor, professor emeritus of political economy at Harvard. "Men who are potential employers should be given every opportunity to start new businesses, instead of being driven into the mass of men seeking employment from existing enterprises. Laws which tend to discourage entrepreneurs should not be passed. The idea that a huge corporation like General Motors, employing thousands of men, should be the target for hostile legislation, thereby decreasing its ability to give employment and to expand is economically unsound.

"The problem of poverty is the problem of wages and employment. The problem of wages is the problem of the labor market. It is a waste of breath to talk about raising wages in any other way than through the betterment of the labor market, and this market, like any other, can be improved in two ways only; by increasing the demand for labor, or by reducing the supply of it. How to increase the demand is a difficult and inclusive problem. To a certain extent, taking more men employers would produce this effect. There are at least two definite ways of reducing the supply of labor in this country. The first is to restrict immigration within narrower and narrower limits. The second is to reduce the birth rate among the poor. Unless one is willing to see one or both of these things done, he has no right to pose as the friend of the laboring man.

"The present undiscriminating drive against public utility rates is calculated to interfere with business expansion and to slow down recovery by reducing the profit of these corporations and therefore their ability to secure money to construct extensions to and replacements of their existing plants. Although the C.W.A. recovery program is useful at the present moment to help get things going, it is, of course, a temporary measure, and by its extensive borrowing merely increases the burden upon the profits of future industry for years to come."