Jesus

see also the website "What Would Jesus Tax?"

Rev. A. C. Auchmuty: Gems from George, a themed collection of excerpts from the writings of Henry George (with links to sources)

THE term Labor includes all human exertion in the production of wealth, whatever its mode. In common parlance we often speak of brain labor and hand labor as though they were entirely distinct kinds of exertion, and labor is often spoken of as though it involved only muscular exertion. But in reality any form of labor, that is to say, any form of human exertion in the production of wealth above that which cattle may be applied to doing, requires the human brain as truly as the human hand, and would be impossible without the exercise of mental faculties on the part of the laborer. Labor in fact is only physical in external form. In its origin it is mental or on strict analysis spiritual. — The Science of Political Economy unabridged: Book III, Chapter 16: The Production of Wealth, The Second Factor of Production — Labor • abridged: Part III, Chapter 10: Order of the Three Factors of Production

IT seems to us that your Holiness misses its real significance in intimating that Christ in becoming the son of a carpenter and Himself working as a carpenter showed merely that "there is nothing to be ashamed of in seeking one's bread by labor." To say that is almost like saying that by not robbing people He showed that there is nothing to be ashamed of in honesty. If you will consider how true in any large view is the classification of all men into working-men, beggar-men and thieves, you will see that it was morally impossible that Christ during His stay on earth should have been anything else than a working-man, since He who came to fulfill the law must by deed as well as word obey God's law of labor.
 
See how fully and how beautifully Christ's life on earth illustrated this law. Entering our earthly life in the weakness of infancy, as it is appointed that all should enter it, He lovingly took what in the natural order is lovingly rendered, the sustenance, secured by labor, that one generation owes to its immediate successors. Arrived at maturity, He earned His own subsistence by that common labor in which the majority of men must and do earn it. Then passing to a higher — to the very highest-sphere of labor. He earned His subsistence by the teaching of moral and spiritual truths, receiving its material wages in the love offerings of grateful hearers, and not refusing the costly spikenard with which Mary anointed his feet. So, when He chose His disciples, He did not go to land-owners or other monopolists who live on the labor of others but to common laboring men. And when He called them to a higher sphere of labor and sent them out to teach moral and spiritual truths He told them to take, without condescension on the one hand, or sense of degradation on the other, the loving return for such labor, saying to them that the "laborer is worthy of his hire," thus showing, what we hold, that all labor does not consist in what is called manual labor, but that whoever helps to add to the material, intellectual, moral, or spiritual fulness of life is also a laborer. - The Condition of Labor

NOR should it be forgotten that the investigator, the philosopher, the teacher, the artist, the poet, the priest, though not engaged in the production of wealth, are not only engaged in the production of utilities and satisfactions to which the production of wealth is only a means, but by acquiring and diffusing knowledge, stimulating mental powers and elevating the moral sense, may greatly increase the ability to produce wealth. For man does not live by bread alone. He is not an engine, in which so much fuel gives so much power. On a capstan bar or a topsail halyard a good song tells like muscle, and a "Marseillaise" or a "Battle Hymn of the Republic" counts for bayonets. A hearty laugh, a noble thought, a perception of harmony, may add to the power of dealing even with material things.

He who by any exertion of mind or body adds to the aggregate of enjoyable wealth, increases the sum of human knowledge or gives to human life higher elevation or greater fulness — he is, in the large meaning of the words, a "producer," a "working-man," a "laborer," and is honestly earning honest wages. But he who without doing aught to make mankind richer, wiser, better, happier, lives on the toil of others — he, no matter by what name of honor he may be I called, or how lustily the priests of Mammon may swing their censers before him, is in the last analysis but a beggarman or a thief. — Protection or Free Trade, Chapter 7 econlib

BUT is there not some line the recognition of which will enable us to say with something like scientific precision that this man is rich and that man is poor; some line of possession which will enable us truly to distinguish between rich and poor in all places and conditions of society; a line of the natural mean or normal possession, below which in varying degrees is poverty, and above which in varying degrees is wealthiness? It seems to me that there must be. And if we stop to think of it, we may see that there is. If we set aside for the moment the narrower economic meaning of service, by which direct service is conveniently distinguished from the indirect service embodied in wealth, we may resolve all the things which directly or indirectly satisfy human desire into one term service, just as we resolve fractions into a common denominator. Now is there not a natural or normal line of the possession or enjoyment of service? Clearly there is. It is that of equality between giving and receiving. This is the equilibrium which Confucius expressed in the golden word of his teaching that in English we translate into "reciprocity."  Naturally the services which a member of a human society is entitled to receive from other members are the equivalents of those he renders to others. Here is the normal line from which what we call wealthiness and what we call poverty take their start. He who can command more service than he need render, is rich. He is poor, who can command less service than he does render or is willing to render: for in our civilization of today we must take note of the monstrous fact that men willing to work cannot always find opportunity to work. The one has more than he ought to have; the other has less. Rich and poor are thus correlatives of each other; the existence of a class of rich involves the existence of a class of poor, and the reverse; and abnormal luxury on the one side and abnormal want on the other have a relation of necessary sequence. To put this relation into terms of morals, the rich are the robbers, since they are at least sharers in the proceeds of robbery; and the poor are the robbed. This is the reason, I take it, why Christ, Who was not really a man of such reckless speech as some Christians deem Him to have been, always expressed sympathy with the poor and repugnance of the rich. In His philosophy it was better even to be robbed than to rob. In the kingdom of right doing which He preached, rich and poor would be impossible, because rich and poor in the true sense are the results of wrong-doing. And when He said, "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven," He simply put in the emphatic form of Eastern metaphor a statement of fact as coldly true as the statement that two parallel lines can never meet. Injustice cannot live where justice rules, and even if the man himself might get through, his riches — his power of compelling service without rendering service — must of necessity be left behind. If there can be no poor in the kingdom of heaven, clearly there can be no rich. And so it is utterly impossible in this, or in any other conceivable world, to abolish unjust poverty, without at the same time abolishing unjust possessions. This is a hard word to the softly amiable philanthropists, who, to speak metaphorically, would like to get on the good side of God without angering the devil. But it is a true word nevertheless. — The Science of Political Economy unabridged: Book II, Chapter 19, The Nature of Wealth: Moral Confusions as to Wealth • abridged: Part II, Chapter 15, The Nature of Wealth: Moral Confusions as to Wealth

"The Man of the People"

NEAR nineteen hundred years ago, when another civilization was developing monstrous inequalities, when the masses everywhere were being ground into hopeless slavery, there arose in a Jewish village an unlearned carpenter, who, scorning the orthodoxies and ritualisms of the time, preached to laborers and fishermen the gospel of the Fatherhood of God, of the equality and brotherhood of men, who taught His disciples to pray for the coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth. The college professors sneered at Him, the orthodox preachers denounced Him. He was reviled as a dreamer, as a disturber, as a "communist," and, finally, organized society took the alarm, and He was crucified between two thieves. But the word went forth, and, spread by fugitives and slaves, made its way against power and against persecution till it revolutionized the world, and out of the rotting old civilization brought the germ of the new. Then the privileged classes rallied again, carved the effigy of the man of the people in the courts and on the tombs of kings, in His name consecrated inequality, and wrested His gospel to the defense of social injustice. But again the same great ideas of a common fatherhood, of a common brotherhood, of a social state in which none shall be overworked and none shall want, begin to quicken in common thought. — Social Problems — Chapter 4, Two Opposing Tendencies

 

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