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Saving the X Industry 87they are more efficiently employed to be diverted to an industry inwhich they are less efficiently employed. Less wealth is created. Theaverage standard of living is lowered compared with what it wouldhave been.4These results are virtually inherent, in fact, in the very argumentsput forward to subsidize the X industry. The X industry is shrinkingor dying by the contention of its friends. Why, it may be asked, shouldit be kept alive by artificial respiration? The idea that an expandingeconomy implies that all industries must be simultaneously expandingis a profound error. In order that new industries may grow fastenough it is necessary that some old industries should be allowed toshrink or die. They must do this in order to release the necessary capitaland labor for the new industries. If we had tried to keep the horseand-buggytrade artificially alive we should have slowed down thegrowth of the automobile industry and all the trades dependent on it.We should have lowered the production of wealth and retarded economicand scientific progress.We do the same thing, however, when we try to prevent any industryfrom dying in order to protect the labor already trained or the capitalalready invested in it. Paradoxical as it may seem to some, it is justas necessary to the health of a dynamic economy that dying industriesbe allowed to die as that growing industries be allowed to grow. Thefirst process is essential to the second. It is as foolish to try to preserveobsolescent industries as to try to preserve obsolescent methods ofproduction: this is often, in fact, merely two ways of describing thesame thing. Improved methods of production must constantly supplantobsolete methods, if both old needs and new wants are to befilled by better commodities and better means.