Individual Liberty - Evernote

protecting power to lend its aid to the collection of any rent whatsoever; this state of
things to be brought about by inducing the people to steadily refuse the payment of
rent and taxes, and thereby, as well as by all other means of passive and moral
resistance, compel the State to repeal all the so-called land titles now existing.
Thus "the land for the people" according to Liberty is the only "land for the people"
that means the abolition of landlordism and the annihilation of rent; and all of Henry
George's talk about "peasant proprietorship necessarily meaning nothing more than an
extension of the landlord class" is the veriest rot, which should be thrown back upon
him by the charge that land nationalization means nothing more than a diminution of
the landlord class and a concentration and hundred-fold multiplication of the
landlords power.
Rent
"Edgeworth," a frequent contributor to Liberty, had read a couple of Proudhon's
books, treating of the rent question, which Mr. Tucker had recommended to him, and
he seemed to be muddled about the "fiction of the productivity of capital," and some
other things. And so the editor enlightened him:
The two works which I recommended to Edgeworth are among Proudhon's best; but
they are very far from all that he has written, and it is very natural for the reader of a
very small portion of his writings to draw inferences which he will find unwarranted
when he reads more. This is due principally to Proudhon's habit of using words in
different senses at different times, which I regard as unfortunate. Now, in the article
which gave rise to this discussion, Edgeworth inferred (or seemed to infer), from the
fact that some of Proudhon's transitional proposals allowed, a share to capital for a
time, that he contemplated as a permanent arrangement a division of labor's earnings
between labor and capital as two distinct things. Lest this might mislead, I took the
liberty to correct it, and to state that Proudhon thought labor the only legitimate title to
wealth.
Now comes Edgeworth, and says that he meant by capital only the result of
preparatory labor, which is as much entitled to reward as any other. Very good, say I;
no one denies that. But this is not what is ordinarily meant by the "productivity of
capital"; and Edgeworth, by his own rule, is bound to use words in their usual sense.
The usual sense of this phrase, and the sense in which the economists use it, is that
capital has such an independent share in all production that the owner of it may
rightfully farm out the privilege of using it, receive a steady income from it, have it
restored to him intact at the expiration of the lease, farm it out again to somebody
else, and go on in this way, he and his heirs forever, living in a permanent state of
idleness and luxury simply from having performed a certain amount of "preparatory
labor." That is what Proudhon denounced as "the fiction of the productivity of
capital"; and Edgeworth, in interpreting the phrase otherwise, gives it a very unusual
sense, in violation of his own rule.
Moreover, what Edgeworth goes on to say about the proportional profits of landlord
and tenant indicates that he has very loose ideas about the proper reward of labor,
whether present or preparatory. The scientific reward (and under absolutely free