Labour and the Popular Welfare

A Ground of Agreement for all Parties 3 Facts and Principles which are the same for everybody 6 The Income of the Individual as the Aim and Test of Government 8 Private Income a...

The Cause of Production generally 84 The Production of Given Quantities 85 Production a Century Ago 86 Amount of Capital employed in it 87 Land, Capital, and Human Exertion 88 H...

A confusing Socialistic Formula 171 A Plausible Argument 173 A Plausible Argument analysed 174 Its implied meaning considered 175 The real Taskmaster of Labour not an Employing...

Short Summary of the preceding Arguments 237 The preceding Arguments from the Labourer’s Point of View 240 The Share of Labour in the growing Products of Ability 242 The amount...

◆¹ I wish this book to be something which, when the subject of it is considered, the reader perhaps will think it cannot possibly be. For its subject—to describe it in the vague...

◆¹ Let me then repeat that we start with assuming cupidity as not only the general foundation, but also as the inevitable, the natural, and the right foundation, of the interest...

◆¹ The gross income of the United Kingdom—the aggregate yearly amount received by the entire population—is computed to be in round numbers some _thirteen hundred million pounds_...

◆¹ We have just seen how disappointing, to those even who would gain most by it, would be the results of an equal division of the national income of this country, and how intole...

Although, as we have seen, of the yearly income of the nation a part only consists of material things, yet the remainder depends upon these, and its amount is necessarily in pro...

The question before us will be most easily understood if we begin with once again waiving any consideration of Capital, and if we deal only with what Mill, in the passage just q...

◆¹ Land, which in economics means everything that the earth produces and the areas it offers for habitation, is of course in a sense at the bottom of every industry. But if we w...

◆¹ Circulating Capital, or, as it is better to call it, Wage Capital, is practically a store of those things which wages are used to buy—that is to say the common necessaries of...

◆¹ I said in the last chapter that machinery or Fixed Capital was congealed Wage Capital. But as Wage Capital is metamorphosed into machinery only owing to the fact that it is a...

◆¹ I have already said something—but in very general terms—of what, at the close of the last century, the wealth of this country was. Let us now consider the subject a little mo...

◆¹ There is one point which now must be quite plain to every reader, and on which there is no need to insist further; namely, that Ability is as truly a productive agent as Labo...

It may amuse the reader to hear this argument stated—forcibly, if not very fully—by an American Socialist, in an anonymous letter to myself. I had published an article in _The N...

◆¹ But the socialistic theorist will not even yet have been silenced. Even if he is constrained to admit the truth of all that has just been said, we shall find that he still po...

◆¹ In spite, then, of the arguments which Socialists have borrowed from psychology, and with which, by transferring them to the sphere of economics, and so depriving them of all...

◆¹ The conclusion just arrived at is not yet completely stated; for there are certain further facts to be considered in connection with it which have indeed already come under o...

The first of the points I have alluded to can be disposed of very quickly. It relates to Land. In analysing the causes to which our national income is due, I began with showing...

Let me repeat in other words what I have just said. The labouring classes, under the existing condition of things, have acquired more wealth in a given time than the most sangui...

◆¹ I will speak first of the kind of legislation, popularly called Socialistic, which certain people now regard with so much hope, and others with corresponding dread; and I sha...

◆¹ The object of this work, as I explained in the opening chapter, is to point out to the great body of the people—that is to say, to the multitude of average men and women, who...