c. Significance of the Upward Tendency of Rent.
Now, what is the meaning of this tendency of Rent to rise with social progress,
while Wages tend to fall? Is it not a plain promise that if Rent be treated
as common property, advances in productive power shall be steps in the direction
of realizing through orderly and natural growth those grand conceptions of
both the socialist and the individualist, which in the present condition
of society are justly ranked as Utopian? Is it not likewise a plain warning
that if Rent be treated as private property, advances in productive power
will be steps in the direction of making slaves of the many laborers, and
masters of a few land-owners? Does it not mean that common ownership of Rent
is in harmony with natural law, and that its private appropriation is disorderly
and degrading? When the cause of Rent and the tendency illustrated in the
preceding chart are considered in connection with the self-evident truth
that God made the earth for common use and not for private monopoly, how
can a contrary inference hold? Caused and increased by social growth, 97
the benefits of which should be common, and attaching to land, the just right
to which is equal, Rent must be the natural fund for public expenses. 98
97. Here, far away from civilization, is a solitary settler. Getting no
benefits from government, he needs no public revenues, and none of the land
about him has any value. Another settler comes, and another, until a village
appears. Some public revenue is then required. Not much, but some. And the
land has a little value, only a little; perhaps just enough to equal the
need for public revenue. The village becomes a town. More revenues are needed,
and land values are higher. It becomes a city. The public revenues required
are enormous, and so are the land values.
98. Society, and society alone, causes Rent. Rising with the rise, advancing
with the growth, and receding with the decline of society, it measures the
earning power of society as a whole as distinguished from that of the individuals.
Wages, on the other hand, measure the earning power of the individuals as
distinguished from that of society as a whole. We have distinguished the
parts into which Wealth is distributed as Wages and Rent; but it would be
correct, indeed it is the same thing, to regard all wealth as earnings, and
to distinguish the two kinds as Communal Earnings and Individual Earnings.
How, then, can there be any question as to the fund from which society should
be supported? How can it be justly supported in any other way than out of
its own earnings?
If there be at all such a thing as design in the universe — and who
can doubt it? — then has it been designed that Rent, the earnings of
the community, shall be retained for the support of the community, and that
Wages, the earnings of the individual, shall be left to the individual in
proportion to the value of his service. This is the divine law, whether we
trace it through complex moral and economic relations, or find it in the
eighth commandment.
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