Economic inequality

“ Where all nations have as yet failed, however, is in the distribution of the industrial product. In the end a gross inequality of wealth and income, as we find it in all developed countries, is another form of waste. It means fewer economic satisfactions, less true value. A few billion dollars added to the income of twenty thousand families is of less utility than when distributed among {190} twenty millions. Inequality of wealth, moreover, involves low wages, over-work, child labour, insecurity, unemployment, preventable disease, premature death, in short, a bad economy. ”

“ Likewise, the importance to industry of active and enterprising leadership. Thirdly: the social and economic evil effects of great inequality of wealth. Fourthly: the fact that the health, energy, spirit, and intelligence of the wage earners are 243 factors of high importance in the creation of a stable and effective industrial régime, and that the development and display of these qualities by individuals are affected by their economic conditions and surroundings, here and now. Likewise, the importance of giving the best possible opportunity to all to develop their natural ability. ”

“ It is not in the relations of capital and labour, it is not in the pressure of population against subsistence, that an explanation of the unequal development of our civilization is to be found. The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. ”

“ And any continued increase in the absolute amount of the product of industry taking the form of profits will be likely to lead to a considerable measure of inequality of wealth; unless the amount of accumulation and investment on the part of the wage earners is largely increased. ”

“ Does the manufacturer, the merchant, the landlord, owe his wealth of accumulated labor to his own activity and the industry of his ancestors? Is the want of capital, the poverty of the toiling proletarians solely due to their own and their fathers' fault? But if the present inequality of fortune is not solely due to the economically correct action of the property-holding class and the shiftlessness of the non-possessing class, to what other cause can it be attributed? ”

“ Since there are two modes in which the inequality, which is indeed the condition and constituent of riches, may be established—namely, by increase of possession on the one side, and by decrease of it on the other—we have to inquire, with respect to any given state of riches, precisely in what manner the correlative poverty was produced ”

“ In this case, as in all cases of permanent inequality between the wages of different employments, prices and values receive the impress of the inequality. Slave-grown will exchange for non-slave-grown commodities in a less ratio than that of the quantity of labour required for their production ”

“ But the processes involved in the production and distribution of wealth, though far from being coextensive with all social progress, are typical of it. They form, moreover, the subject with regard to which contending politicians and reformers practically join issue; and it is mainly because inequality in the possession of wealth is affirmed to be a permanent and necessary feature of civilisation, that the conclusions here put forward will be attacked. ”

“ But if we admit both the suppositions above mentioned, we still think that inequality of property is injurious to mankind; the effect of it being to bring poverty and misery on the many; whilst it only gives riches to the few, and does not render them happy.
It may be said that wealth might be justly acquired by industry and economy. ”

“ How far is it possible to abolish poverty, or to institute economic equality without arresting industrial progress? We cannot put the question without raising more fundamental issues. What is the real meaning of “equality” in economics? ”

“ This fact does not force to the conclusion that industrial inequality as it exists to-day, the great disparity of incomes, correctly or justly reflects the degree of difference in men's qualities, either native or acquired. ”

“ The equanimity of our study of political economy is always disturbed by its manifest inequalities and misfortunes. We plainly see and deeply lament the inequality in the apportionment of land and capital, and vainly try to remedy it. But is there not quite as great inequality in the apportionment of industrial powers? ”

“ Would not, in fact, the equality of land and capital merely emphasize the other and confessedly irremediable inequality? The drudges who make a poor living work as hard, and their work wears as painfully on their nerves, as can be said of the competent who without land or capital are able to make a good living. Are they then to be given a good living for little or unimportant work? ”

“ Thus, to relieve labor and capital from all taxation, direct and indirect, and to throw the burden upon rent, would be, as far as it went, to counteract this tendency to inequality, and, if it went so far as to take in taxation the whole of rent, the cause of inequality would be totally destroyed. Rent, instead of causing inequality, as now, would then promote equality. Labor and capital would then receive the whole produce, minus that portion taken by the state in the taxation of land values, which, being applied to public purposes, would be equally distributed in public benefits. ”

“ The rash and absurd assumption that such inequalities are necessarily advantageous, lies at the root of most of the popular fallacies on the subject of political economy. For the eternal and inevitable law in this matter is, that the beneficialness of the inequality depends, first, on the methods by which it was accomplished, and, secondly, on the purposes to which it is applied. Inequalities of wealth, unjustly established, have assuredly injured the nation in which they exist during their establishment ”

“ This inequality of fortunes which all admit to be the cause of society's embarrassments, is it, as some assert, the effect of Nature; or, in the division of the products of labor and the soil, may there not have been some error in calculation? Does each laborer receive all that is due him, and only that which is due him? In short, in the present conditions of labor, wages, and exchange, is no one wronged?—are the accounts well kept?—is the social balance accurate? ”

“ The value of labor might be considered as the principal criterion of wealth, and ability to support taxes, and this would find its level in different places, where the intercourse should be easy and free, with as much certainty as the value of money or any other thing. Wherever labor would yield most, people would resort, till the competition should destroy the inequality. Hence it is that the people are constantly swarming from the more to the less populous places—from Europe to America—from the northern and middle parts of the United States to the southern and western. ”

“ This was called production for profit, but the political-economy class the other morning showed us that production for profit was economic suicide, tending inevitably, by limiting the consuming power of a community, to a fractional part of its productive power to cripple production in turn, and so to keep the mass of mankind in perpetual poverty. And surely this is enough to say about the incentives to wealth-making which the world lost in abandoning private capitalism, first general poverty, and second the profit system, which caused that poverty. ”

“ It is true, especially in the United States, that the poor have become rich and the rich poor, but inequality of condition is about as marked as it was before the invention of labor-saving machinery, and though workingmen are better off in many ways, the accumulation of vast fortunes, acquired often in brutal disregard of humanity, marks the contrast of conditions perhaps more emphatically than it ever appeared before. ”

“ This is, of course, an example of one only out of many ways in which inequality of possession may be established between different persons, giving rise to the Mercantile forms of Riches and Poverty. In the instance before us, one of the men might from the first have deliberately chosen to be idle, and to put his life in pawn for present ease; or he might have mismanaged his land, and been compelled to have recourse to his neighbour for food and help, pledging his future labour for it. ”

“ The tendency to inequality, which is the necessary result of material progress where land is monopolized, cannot go much farther without carrying our civilization into that downward path which is so easy to enter and so hard to abandon. Everywhere the increasing intensity of the struggle to live, the increasing necessity for straining every nerve to prevent being thrown down and trodden underfoot in the scramble for wealth, is draining the forces that gain and maintain improvements. ”

“ In countries of political equality and economical inequality the capitalist régime, the faulty distribution of wealth, at once restrains and precipitates the birth-rate by perpetually increasing the wrongful apportionment of means. ”

“ From society and the luxury to which it gives birth arise the liberal and mechanical arts, commerce, letters, and all those superfluities which make industry flourish, and enrich and ruin nations. The reason for such destruction is plain. It is easy to see, from the very nature of agriculture, that it must be the least lucrative of all the arts; for, its produce being the most universally necessary, the price must be proportionate to the abilities of the very poorest of mankind. ”

“ But in time, wealth grows and inequality begins. A and his children are industrious, and prosper; B and his children are idle, and fail. If manufactures on a considerable scale are established—and most young communities strive even by protection to establish them—the tendency to inequality is intensified. ”

“ In vain do we express our indignation against a theory which, creating by labor itself an aristocracy of capacities, leads inevitably to political inequality; in vain do we protest in the name of democracy and progress that in the future there will be no nobility, no bourgeoisie no pariahs. The economist replies, with the impassibility of destiny: You are condemned to produce much, and to produce cheaply; otherwise your industry will be always insignificant, your commerce will amount to nothing, and you will drag in the rear of civilization instead of taking the lead.—What! ”

“ Inequality of wages, like the right of increase, is economically impossible. Take the most favorable case,—that where each laborer has furnished his maximum production; that there may be an equitable distribution of products, the share of each must be equal to the quotient of the total production divided by the number of laborers. ”

“ The wealth of society is growing, and this growth is accompanied by a growth of poverty.—The creative efficiency of the means of production is increasing, and the consequence is that they are scrapped. Social conditions demand that the material position of the working classes should be raised to the level of their political status, and economic conditions, by way of answer, depress them further. Society needs the unrestricted growth of wealth, and contemporary leaders of production must create restrictions, in order to discourage poverty. ”

“ When these iniquities prevailed, and there was neither freedom of industry nor security of property—when capital and labour were not united—when all men consequently worked unprofitably, because they worked without division of labour, accumulation of knowledge, and union of forces—there was universal poverty, because there was feeble production. ”

“ It is by such taxes, indeed, by which the poor are eased, and the burdens thrown on the rich, that it is possible to prevent the continual increase of inequality of fortune; the subjection of such a multitude of artisans and useless servants to the rich, the multiplication of idle persons in our cities, and the depopulation of the country-side. ”

“ Chapter XIV The persistence of poverty amidst advancing wealth Look over the world today. In countries the most widely differing - under conditions the most diverse as to government, as to industries, as to tariffs, as to currency - you will find distress among the working-classes; but everywhere that you thus find distress and destitution in the midst of wealth you will find that the land is monopolized; that, for its use by labour, large revenues are extorted from the earnings of labour. ”

“ They have placed on one side the majority of the population, who carry the burdens of economic society, and put forth the energy necessary to propel industry. On the other side, the economic forces have ranged a small group of persons in whose hands is concentrated the great bulk of the income-yielding wealth of the community. The forces of economic society are sharpening the contrast between service and property income, and adding daily to the irony of a status which compels workers to skimp and abstain while property owners may idle and luxuriate. ”

“ The current state of the European economy, with its high levels of unemployment, poverty and increasing inequality, is a source of concern, anxiety and even moral outrage for many of our fellow citizens. ”

“ We have seen that what kept the world in poverty under private capitalism was the effect of profits, aided by rent and interest to reduce consumption and thus cripple production, by concentrating the purchasing power of the people in the hands of a few. ”

“ The one great cause of all the ruin of society and States is this, that labor never receives the full proceeds of its product; but must, because it is disinherited, create capital for a minority—the owners of means of labor, of land, buildings, machines, money, etc., by creating surplus value, furnishing surplus labor, more labor than is paid for, working surplus time, more time than is required to defray the expenses of its own sustenance. ”