In the Encyclical however you commend the application to the ordinary relations
of life, under normal conditions, of principles that in ethics are only
to be tolerated under extraordinary conditions. You are driven to this
assertion of false rights by your denial of true rights. The natural right
which each man has is not that of demanding employment or wages from another
man; but that of employing himself — that of applying by his own
labor to the inexhaustible storehouse which the Creator has in the land
provided for all men. Were that storehouse open, as by the single tax we
would open it, the natural demand for labor would keep pace with the supply,
the man who sold labor and the man who bought it would become free exchangers
for mutual advantage, and all cause for dispute between workman and employer
would be gone. For then, all being free to employ themselves, the mere
opportunity to labor would cease to seem a boon; and since no one would
work for another for less, all things considered, than he could earn by
working for himself, wages would necessarily rise to their full value,
and the relations of workman and employer be regulated by mutual interest
and convenience.
This is the only way in which they can be satisfactorily regulated.
Your Holiness seems to assume that there is some just rate of wages that
employers ought to be willing to pay and that laborers should be content
to receive, and to imagine that if this were secured there would be an end
of strife. This rate you evidently think of as that which will give working-men
a frugal living, and perhaps enable them by hard work and strict economy
to lay by a little something.
But how can a just rate of wages be fixed without the “higgling of
the market” any more than the just price of corn or pigs or ships or
paintings can be so fixed? And would not arbitrary regulation in the one
case as in the other check that interplay that most effectively promotes
the economical adjustment of productive forces? Why should buyers of labor,
any more than buyers of commodities, be called on to pay higher prices than
in a free market they are compelled to pay? Why should the sellers of labor
be content with anything less than in a free market they can obtain? Why
should working-men be content with frugal fare when the world is so rich?
Why should they be satisfied with a lifetime of toil and stinting, when the
world is so beautiful? Why should not they also desire to gratify the higher
instincts, the finer tastes? Why should they be forever content to travel
in the steerage when others find the cabin more enjoyable?
... read the whole letter