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Wealth and Want | |||||||
... because democracy alone is not enough to produce widely shared prosperity. | |||||||
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Reparations
If poverty is appointed by the power which
is above us all, then it is no crime; but if poverty is unnecessary, then
it is a crime for which society is responsible and for which society must
suffer. I hold, and I think no one who looks at the facts can fail to see,
that poverty is utterly unnecessary. It is not by the decree of the Almighty,
but it is because of our own injustice, our own selfishness, our own ignorance,
that this scourge, worse than any pestilence, ravages our civilisation, bringing
want and suffering and degradation, destroying souls as well as bodies. Look
over the world, in this heyday of nineteenth century civilisation. In every
civilised country under the sun you will find men and women whose condition
is worse than that of the savage: men and women and little children with
whom the veriest savage could not afford to exchange. Even in this new city
of yours with virgin soil around you, you have had this winter to institute
a relief society. Your roads have been filled with tramps, fifteen, I am
told, at one time taking shelter in a round-house here. As here, so everywhere;
and poverty is deepest where wealth most abounds.
What more unnatural than this? There is nothing in nature like this poverty which today curses us. We see rapine in nature; we see one species destroying another; but as a general thing animals do not feed on their own kind; and, wherever we see one kind enjoying plenty, all creatures of that kind share it. No man, I think, ever saw a herd of buffalo, of which a few were fat and the great majority lean. No man ever saw a flock of birds, of which two or three were swimming in grease and the others all skin and bone. Nor in savage life is there anything like the poverty that festers in our civilisation. In a rude state of society there are seasons of want, seasons when people starve; but they are seasons when the earth has refused to yield her increase, when the rain has not fallen from the heavens, or when the land has been swept by some foe – not when there is plenty. And yet the peculiar characteristic of this modern poverty of ours is that it is deepest where wealth most abounds. Why, today, while over the civilised world there is so much distress, so much want, what is the cry that goes up? What is the current explanation of the hard times? Overproduction! There are so many clothes that men must go ragged, so much coal that in the bitter winters people have to shiver, such over-filled granaries that people actually die by starvation! Want due to over-production! Was a greater absurdity ever uttered? How can there be over-production till all have enough? It is not over-production; it is unjust distribution. ... We talk about over-production. How can there be such a thing as over-production while people want? All these things that are said to be over-produced are desired by many people. Why do they not get them? They do not get them because they have not the means to buy them; not that they do not want them. Why have not they the means to buy them? They earn too little. When the great masses of men have to work for an average of $1.40 a day, it is no wonder that great quantities of goods cannot be sold. Now why is it that men have to work for
such low wages? Because if they were to demand higher wages there are plenty
of unemployed men ready to step into their places. It is this mass of unemployed
men who compel that fierce competition that drives wages down to the point
of bare subsistence. Why is it that there are men who cannot get employment?
Did you ever think what a strange thing it is that men cannot find employment?
Adam had no difficulty in finding employment; neither had Robinson Crusoe;
the finding of employment was the last thing that troubled them.
If men cannot find an employer, why cannot they employ themselves? Simply because they are shut out from the element on which human labour can alone be exerted. Men are compelled to compete with each other for the wages of an employer, because they have been robbed of the natural opportunities of employing themselves; because they cannot find a piece of God's world on which to work without paving some other human creature for the privilege. ... In the Old Testament we are told that
when the Israelites journeyed through the desert, they were hungered, and
that God sent manna down out of the heavens. There was enough for all of
them, and they all took it and were relieved. But supposing that desert had
been held as private property, as the soil of Great Britain is held, as the
soil even of our new States is being held; suppose that one of the Israelites
had a square mile, and another one had twenty square miles, and another one
had a hundred square miles, and the great majority of the Israelites did
not have enough to set the soles of their feet upon, which they could call
their own — what would become of the manna? What good would it have
done to the majority? Not a whit. Though God had sent down manna
enough for all, that manna would have been the property of the landholders;
they would
have employed some of the others perhaps, to gather it up into heaps for
them, and would have sold it to their hungry brethren. Consider it; this
purchase and sale of manna might have gone on until the majority of Israelites
had given all they had, even to the clothes off their backs. What then? Then
they would not have had anything left to buy manna with, and the consequences
would have been that while they went hungry the manna would have lain in
great heaps, and the landowners would have been complaining of the over-production
of manna. There would have been a great harvest of manna and hungry people,
just precisely the phenomenon that we see today. ...
Now go into the cities and what do you see! Why, you see even a lower depth of poverty; aye, if I would point out the worst of the evils of land monopoly I would not take you to Connemara; I would not take you to Skye or Kintire — I would take you to Dublin or Glasgow or London. There is something worse than physical deprivation, something worse than starvation; and that is the degradation of the mind, the death of the soul. That is what you will find in those cities. Now, what is the cause of that? Why, it is plainly to be seen; the people driven off the land in the country are driven into the slums of the cities. For every man that is driven off the land the demand for the produce of the workmen of the cities is lessened; and the man himself with his wife and children, is forced among those workmen to compete upon any terms for a bare living and force wages down. Get work he must or starve — get work he must or do that which those people, so long as they maintain their manly feelings, dread more than death, go to the alms-houses. That is the reason, here as in Great Britain, that the cities are overcrowded. Open the land that is locked up, that is held by dogs in the manger, who will not use it themselves and will not allow anybody else to use it, and you would see no more of tramps and hear no more of over-production. ... read the whole speech Winston Churchill: The People's Land Every
form of
enterprise only undertaken after the land monopolist has skimmed the
cream off for himself It does not matter where you
look or what examples you select, you will
see that every form of enterprise, every step in material progress, is
only undertaken after the land monopolist has skimmed the cream off for
himself, and everywhere today the man or the public body who wishes to
put land to its highest use is forced to pay a preliminary fine in land
values to the man who is putting it to an inferior use, and in some
cases to no use at all. All comes back to the land value, and its owner
for the time being is able to levy his toll upon all other forms of
wealth and upon every form of industry. A portion, in some cases the whole, of
every benefit which is laboriously acquired by the community is
represented in the land value, and finds its way automatically
into the
landlord's pocket. If there is a rise in wages, rents are able
to move forward, because the workers can afford to pay a little more.
If the opening of a new railway or a new tramway or the institution of
an improved service of workmen's trains or a lowering of fares or a new
invention or any other public convenience affords a benefit to the
workers in any particular district, it becomes easier for them to live,
and therefore the landlord and the
ground landlord, one on top of the
other, are able to charge them more for the privilege of living there. ...
Read the whole piece
Nic Tideman: A Bill of Economic Rights and Obligations ... While
the bill of economic rights and obligations does not address
the issue explicitly, it should be understood that people have a
right to redress for past injustice, no matter how far back in the
past. If some persons have inferior starting positions because they
are the descendants of slaves who, because of that status, were
unable to provide what others provided to their children, then there
should be a levy on the property of the descendants of slave-owners
to rectify that injustice.
In fulfilling its obligation to ensure that future generations had opportunities at least as great as those of the present generation, people would want to take account of: 1. The amount of land per capita, adjusted for the quality of land; Decreases in some items could be
offset by increases in others. If
people wanted to have more children than could be provided with
opportunities equal to those of the present generation, Congress and
state legislatures would have an obligation to tax those who wanted
to have children, so that people would have fewer children, and so
that all children could be provided with an initial endowment upon
attaining maturity, to compensate for reductions in other items on
the list. Read the entire article
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Wealth
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... because democracy
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