The Affluent Society

by John Kenneth Galbraith

In the general view, it is privately produced production that is important, and that nearly alone. This adds to national well-being. Its increase measures the increase in national wealth. Public services, by comparison, are an incubus. They are necessary, and they may be necessary in considerable volume. But they are a burden which must, in effect, be carried by the private production. If that burden is too great, private production will stagger and fall. At best, public services are a necessary evil; at worst, they are a malign tendency against which an alert community must exercise eternal vigilance. Even when they serve the most important ends, such services are sterile. “Government is [held to be] powerless to create anything in the sense in which business produces wealth . . .”5 Such attitudes lead to some interesting contradictions. We welcome expansion of telephone services as improving the general well-being but, on occasion, accept curtailment of postal services as signifying necessary economy. We set great store by the increase in private wealth but regret the added outlays for the police force by which it is protected. Vacuum cleaners to ensure clean houses are praiseworthy and essential in our standard of living. Street cleaners to ensure clean streets are an unfortunate expense. Partly as a result, our houses are generally clean and our streets generally filthy. In the more sophisticated of the conventional wisdom, this distinction between public and private s...