Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of Wealth

In economic and social discussion the word reform is commonly opposed to the word revolution. It implies modification rather than abolition, gradual rather than violent change....

Thus wrote Professor Frank Haight Dixon in a paper read at the twenty-seventh annual meeting of the American Economic Association, December, 1914. Whether he reflected the opini...

If land were not privately owned there would be no receiving of rent by individuals. Therefore, the morality of the landlord's share of the national product is intimately relate...

Proposals for the reform of social conditions are important in proportion to the magnitude of the evils which they are designed to remove, and are desirable in proportion to the...

Although the principle of needs is somewhat prominent among the theories of wage justice, it received only incidental mention in the last chapter. Considered as a comprehensive...

Interest is not a return for labour. The majority of interest receivers are, indeed, regularly engaged at some active task, whether as day labourers, salaried employés, director...

As we saw in the last chapter, interest cannot be conclusively justified on the ground of either productivity or service. It is impossible to demonstrate that the capitalist has...

Starting from the principle that the rightness or wrongness of any system of land tenure is determined not by metaphysical and intrinsic considerations, but by the effects of th...

A living wage for all workers is merely the _minimum_ measure of just remuneration. It is not in every case complete justice. Possibly it is not the full measure of justice in a...

Throughout this book we have been concerned with a two-fold problem: to apply the principles of justice to the workings of the present distributive system, and to point out the...

"Never has our party told the workingman about a 'State of the future,' never in any way than as a mere utopia. If anybody says: 'I picture to myself society after our programme...

The correctives of the present distribution that were proposed before the beginning of the last chapter related mainly to the apportionment of the product among the agents of pr...

The conclusion was drawn in the last chapter that the surplus gains of corporations operating in conditions of competition, can justly be retained by the stockholders as the rem...

In his address as President of the American Sociological Society at the annual meeting, Dec. 27, 1913, Professor Albion W. Small denounced "the fallacy of treating capital as th...

If the taxation and other measures of reform suggested in Section I were fully applied to our land system; if co-operative enterprise were extended to its utmost practicable lim...

In the last chapter we saw that a monopoly has no right to gains in excess of the competitive rate of interest on its capital, except in so far as these have been derived from s...

The conclusions of the preceding chapter include the statement that individuals are morally justified in becoming and remaining landowners. May we take a further step, and asser...

Thirty or thirty-five years ago, the majority of economic historians seemed to accept the theory that land was originally owned in common.[1] They held that in the beginning the...

Before taking up the question of the morality of profits, it will be helpful, if not necessary, to consider the chief rules of justice that have been or might be adopted in dist...

Interest denotes that part of the product of industry which goes to the capitalist. As the ownership of land commands rent, so the ownership of capital commands interest; as ren...

We have seen that profits are that share of the product of industry which goes to the business man. They comprise that residual portion which he finds in his hands after he has...

The defence of private landownership set forth in the last chapter has been conditional. It has tended to show that the institution is morally lawful so long as no better system...

The chapters immediately preceding have led to the conclusion that private ownership is the best system of land tenure, and that the individual has a natural right to participat...

In a preceding chapter we saw that Marxian Socialism is logically debarred from passing _moral_ judgment upon any social institution or practice.[114] If social institutions are...

We have seen that rent goes to the landlord as the price of land use, while interest is received by the capitalist as the return for the use of capital. The two shares of the pr...

That part of the national product which represents land, and is attributed specifically to land, goes to the landowner. It is called economic rent, or simply rent. We say that r...

The present edition of Professor Taussig's standard work embodies many changes throughout the text, thus bringing his work abreast of the most recent developments. The chapter o...

[179] It may be of interest to recall the mediæval attitude toward monopolistic exactions, as summarily stated by St. Antoninus, who was archbishop of Florence in the first half...

natural right. The fundamental considerations there examined lead to the parallel conclusion that the individual has a natural right to own capital. But we could not immediately...

Appendix III, Production, Present and Future, by W. I. King, Ph.D., Instructor in Statistics, University of Wisconsin; Appendix IV, List of Cases Illustrating the Attitude of th...