Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

Ethics, Economics, and Government 163
well as capital or land; then it is called the rent of ability. There is no moral
reason that the talented person should have more than the untalented one,
but people won’t pay as much to hear an untalented person sing as they
will pay Pavarotti. Talent is a gift, something its possessor has done nothing
to deserve. If earning is working, then rent is unearned income. When
told that genius should receive preferential compensation, Sidney Trefusis
replies that “genius cost its possessor nothing; that it was the inheritance
of the whole race incidentally vested in a single individual; and that if that
individual employed his monopoly of it to extort money from others, he
deserved nothing better than hanging” (Unsocial Socialist 106). True, you
generally must work yourself to get the benefit of the rent of ability, but
rent, technically, refers to that extra that your talent provides you above
what others doing the same thing would earn. If that were the case with all
forms of rent, however, rent and inequality would be limited although not
eliminated. In other words, if no one could own more of the means of production
than they could work themselves, there would be little problem
even with some continuing inequality. But that is not the case. All productive
economic activity involves both labor and resources. When a society is
divided into those who own and those who work, as ours is, injustice and
poverty are inevitable.
Why Property Is Theft
Throughout his long life Shaw was fond of repeating Proudhon’s famous
aphorism: “Property is theft.” That, for Shaw, summed up the central truth
at the heart of socialism. People still are shocked—perhaps even more now,
in an age that has forgotten all of the economic dialectic of the nineteenth
century and accepts unthinkingly the current conventional wisdom that
communism is wicked and the right to private property is sacred. So perhaps
a bit of clarification is in order. First, in economic terms “private property”
is not the same as “personal possessions.” A man who owns a toothbrush
and the shirt on his back is not a man of property. “Property” means
land and capital: the means of production. It is not a question of some
people having more goods, or more expensive toys, than others. The great
evil of private property arises because society is divided into the haves and
have-nots, and what the haves have is the right to live at the expense of
others, while what the have-nots lack is the right to live at all except insofar
as they are useful to the haves. Workers have no right to work for
themselves, only for the owners of property. We have come to accept this
concept so thoroughly that we nod mechanically when we are told to be