Private vices definition
Private vices are ‘public benefits’ — this means not only that good is born of evil, that the immorality of individuals, their egoisms in competition with one another, produce culture and the ‘civilizing’ of society as a whole; it also means that wealth is born of poverty [...], well-being from distress, that what produces prosperity is wage labour; or again that the wealth of a nation consists of a mass of toiling poor (Colletti, 1972, pp. 205).