In The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928), George Bernard Shaw concluded that modern capitalist societies had settled on a particularly obtuse means of determining the economic hierarchy: a system whose basic tenet was that “if every man is left to make as much money as he can for himself in his own way, subject only to the laws restraining crude violence and direct fraud, then wealth will spontaneously distribute itself in proportion to the industry, sobriety and generally the virtue of the citizens, the good men becoming rich and the bad men poor.”
