If then the saving evoked by paying interest merely means that certain fairly well-to-do folks abstain from comforts or luxuries, which, though agreeable and innocent, carry no organic benefit, there is no human cost, or even if there is some slight cost, it may be offset by the individual or social benefit resulting from the postponement of consumption.A large proportion of motived middle-class saving undoubtedly falls within this category.But by no means all.A good deal of lower middle-class saving eats into certain factors of humanly serviceable expenditure, particularly expenditure in education of the young.Frequently it injures the free life of the home by the constant pressure of niggling economies, which, though not perhaps injurious in the particular privations they impose, leave no margin for the small pleasures and amenities which have a vital value.
Even though we assume that such saving brings, in the ownership of property and the interest it yields, a full vital compensation to the individual who saves, it by no means follows that it is socially justified, when a true criterion of social welfare is applied.Take for instance the saving which is diverted from expenditure on education, precluding the children from getting a university or professional training and turning them on the world to earn a living, less effectively equipped than they might have been.Society may be a heavy loser by its policy of evoking such thrift by means of interest, for it obtains a certain amount of material capital in place of the more valuable intellectual or moral capital which the money, expended upon education, might have yielded.Even regarded from the standpoint of future economic productivity, the stimulation of this sort of saving is likely to be injurious.
