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CHAPTER 7The Curse of Machinery1Among the most viable of all economic delusions is the belief thatmachines on net balance create unemployment. Destroyed athousand times, it has risen a thousand times out of its own ashes ashardy and vigorous as ever. Whenever there is long-continued massunemployment, machines get the blame anew. This fallacy is still thebasis of many labor union practices. The public tolerates these practicesbecause it either believes at bottom that the unions are right, oris too confused to see just why they are wrong.The belief that machines cause unemployment, when held withany logical consistency, leads to preposterous conclusions. Not onlymust we be causing unemployment with every technological improvementwe make today, but primitive man must have started causing itwith the first efforts he made to save himself from needless toil andsweat.To go no further back, let us turn to Adam Smith’s The Wealth ofNations, published in 1776. The first chapter of this remarkable book iscalled “Of the Division of Labor,” and on the second page of this firstchapter the author tells us that a workman unacquainted with the use ofmachinery employed in pin making “could scarce make one pin a day,and certainly could not make twenty,” but that with the use of this33