Wealth inequality

“ 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. ”

“ II. The principal causes of the inequality that unfortunately exists among the people of the same community are three in number:—inequality in wealth; inequality of condition between the man whose means of subsistence are both assured and transmissible, and him for whom these means depend upon the duration of his working life; thirdly, inequality of instruction. How are we to establish a continual tendency in these three sources of inequality to diminish in activity and power? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ First fallacy—That the inequality between the rich and the poor in the enjoyment of wealth is continually increasing.
Of course, it is not denied that the inequality in the ownership of wealth is as great as is commonly believed, and is increasing with every generation. What I maintain is that the benefits of this wealth are not so unequally divided as its ownership. To show the fallacy of confounding the two, let us first consider a miser who lives in a garret, sleeps on a mat, eats cold victuals, dresses in rags, and dies worth a million. Measured by the popular standard, he is a rich man. ”

“ I don't object to inequality of mere wealth in itself, because I wouldn't dignify money to that extent. Of course I do object to a situation where the rich man can buy life and health for his sick child and the poor man can't. ”

“ This duty when conscientiously performed re-establishes that economic and social equilibrium which strict justice alone is not able to create. For, the inequitable distribution of wealth greatly depends on the inequality of power of production. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I said, "the poor as a class were in the economic service of the rich, or, as we used to say, labor was dependent on capital for employment, but this service and employment had become in the nineteenth century an entirely voluntary relation on the part of the servant or employee. The rich had no power to compel the poor to be their servants. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The condition of inequality of wealth, heretofore a condition of the process of capital accumulation, is one of the chief causes of the embitterment of industrial relations. Firstly, it is one of the factors which tend to the creation of separate group interests. A high degree of inequality of accumulated wealth leads to a concentration of the control of the larger industrial enterprises 29 within the hands of a small section of the community. The interest in high returns from accumulated wealth appears to be a group interest. ”

“ Wherever there is a great property, there is great inequality. ”

“ And what is so extraordinary is that, at the very time when the inequality of fortunes is extending and an aristocracy is springing into being, the great levelling movement outside obliges the industrial or landed proprietors to hide their luxury, to dissimulate their wealth, for fear of being knocked on the head by their neighbours. ”

“ All these evils were the first effects of property, and the inseparable attendants of growing inequality.
Before the invention of signs to represent riches, wealth could hardly consist in anything but lands and cattle, the only real possessions men can have. But, when inheritances so increased in number and extent as to occupy the whole of the land, and to border on one another, one man could aggrandise himself only at the expense of another ”

“ It is an old illustration of the different view points of the centuries that precisely this point which you make of the possibility of the wage-earner rising, although it was getting to be a vanishing point in your day, seems to us the most truly diabolical feature of the whole system. The prospect of rising as a motive to reconcile the wage-earner or the poor man in general to his subjection, what did it amount to? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now it seems to be believed that although competition produces wide grades of inequality, yet almsgiving, or forcible repartition of wealth, would not do so. Here we come to the real, great, and mischievous fallacy of the social philosophy which is in vogue. Whether there are great extremes of rich and poor in a society is a matter of very little significance ”

“ The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich; and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be any thing very unreasonable. ”

“ But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -indeed, in some sense was the destruction --of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, andpossessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would conferno distinction. ”

“ The one receives without producing; the others produce without receiving. The one is unjustly enriched; the others are robbed. To this fundamental wrong we have traced the unjust distribution of wealth which is separating modern society into the very rich bind the very poor. ”

“ So that the art of becoming "rich" in the common sense is not only the art of accumulating much money for ourselves but also of contriving that our neighbours shall have less. In accurate terms it is "the art of establishing the maximum inequality in our own favour". ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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? ”

“ To extirpate poverty, to make wages what justice commands they should be, the full earnings of the laborer, we must therefore substitute for the individual ownership of land a common ownership. Nothing else will go to the cause of the evil—in nothing else is there the slightest hope.
This, then, is the remedy for the unjust and unequal distribution of wealth apparent in modern civilization, and for all the evils which flow from it:
We must make land common property. ”

“ I could hardly realize that this country had once been the abode of poverty and all of its consequences of ignorance, vice and crime; that here where equal rights, equal opportunities and an equal share in the unlimited abundance which nature places within the easy reach of intelligent labor were the universal and unquestioned law of being, there had once been a grasping and cruel financial and commercial power that condemned the wealth-producing millions to lives of unrequited toil. ”

“ If industry, frugality, and disinterested integrity were alike the virtues of all, there would, apparently, be more of the social spirit, in making all property a common stock, and giving to each individual a proportional title to the wealth of the whole. ”

“ On the one hand we are called upon to see, in the existence of deep poverty side by side with vast accumulations of wealth, the aggressions of capital on labor, and in reply it is pointed out that capital aids labor, and hence we are asked to conclude that there is nothing unjust or unnatural in the wide gulf between rich and poor; that wealth is but the reward of industry, intelligence, and thrift ”

“ Here, again, if the nation had maintained an inventory of these values and appropriated to itself all or a percentage of the increase in value (which results from the increasing public need of the resources and the limited supply, together with the increase in facilities for transportation, etc, rather than from the owner's labor or skill) , many of our present gross inequalities in wealth would have been forestalled, and the community would be far richer in its common wealth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ But when that stock of virgin lands has passed into private ownership; when the poor find themselves confronted with the same difficulties with which they have to struggle in older countries, while the rich relentlessly use their advantages to increase their wealth, — all the more relentlessly as the accumulation of riches will have bred habits of profligate luxury and insatiable selfish indulgence, — what then? ”

“ Why, for instance, should it be thought advantageous that one class, now in possession, be completely despoiled to profit another class, which would then take its place? Whether the inequality existed as from the heights downwards or from the depths upwards, would not{81} the results be exactly the same? Is not the supreme power as dangerous in the hands of the many as in the hands of the privileged? ”

“ In a preceding chapter, we have endeavoured to show that wealth is power over the labour of the poor. But it seems that wealth is not only a certain definite species of power in the rich over the labour of the poor ”

“ Into this, and the other of your monopolies, capital pours its surplus, and finally retires to them with its accumulations, deserting its partnership with labor, and appearing on the scene in the new form of wealth. From a few instances, so rare as to be conspicuous, your holders of large money accumulations become now a numerous and influential class. While your society at one end has been sinking into poverty, it blooms at the other with signs of unusual thrift. With an increase of luxury on one hand, and of want on the other, your city is now approaching the normal state. ”

“ But it is quite true that whilst wealth and welfare are decreasing, productive power is increasing; and nothing but the perversion of this power to the production of socially useless commodities prevents the apparent wealth from becoming real. The purchasing power that commands luxuries in the hands of the rich, would command true wealth in the hands of all. Yet private property must still heap the purchasing power upon the few rich and withdraw it from the many poor. ”

“ 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. ”