Land
and Wages
Henry George: The Wages
of Labor
Nor can the State cure poverty
by regulating wages. It is as
much beyond the power of the State to regulate wages as it is to
regulate the rates of interest. Usury laws have been tried again and
again, but the only effect they have ever had has been to increase what
the poorer borrowers must pay, and for the same reasons that all
attempts to lower by regulation the price of goods have always resulted
merely in increasing their price.
The general rate of wages is fixed
by the ease or difficulty
with which labor can obtain access to land, ranging from the full
earnings of labor, where land is free; to the least on which laborers
can live and reproduce, where land is fully monopolised.
Thus, where it has been
comparatively easy for laborers to
get land, as in the United States and in Australasia, wages have been
higher than in Europe, and it has been impossible to get European
laborers to work there for wages that they would gladly accept at
home; while now, as monopolisation goes on under the influence of
private property in land, wages tend to fall, and the social conditions
of Europe to appear.
Thus, under the partial yet
substantial recognition of common
rights to land, the many attempts of the British Parliaments to reduce
wages by regulation failed utterly: And so, when the institution of
private property in land had done its work in England, all attempts of
Parliament to raise wages proved unavailing.
At the beginning of this
century it was even attempted to
increase the earnings of laborers by grants in aid of wages. But the
only result was to lower commensurately what wages employers paid.
The State could only maintain
wages above the tendency of the
market (for, as I have shown, labor deprived of land becomes a
commodity) by offering employment to all who wish it; or by lending its
sanction to strikes and supporting them with its funds.
Thus it is that the thorough-going
Socialists who want the
State to take all industry into its hands are much more logical than
those timid Socialists who propose that the State should regulate
private industry – but only a little.
...
read the whole article