The present development of a total-credit economy coupled with massive public relief for the unemployed is a transitional response to this. Many are paying for their possessions on time, with nothing down and years to pay, and more will continue to do so. Banks are now encouraging overdrafts, and finance companies are not only eager to loan, but extremely reluctant to repossess in the event of payment defaults. Better you should wreck your auto and have to purchase another than that the finance company should have to repossess it. They do not want your old car any more than you do.
Value produced by machines is still value.
All our socializing institutions have, quite properly in the industrializing period, stressed the value of work. But I have already suggested that work is becoming no longer economically necessary, and hence no longer socially desirable. Yet, as now socialized, man must work. So completely are we work-oriented that we destroy ourselves without it. This is the case not only in the West.