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Updated: June 19, 2025
When the farm-rent of a piece of land is once raised to its highest point, the proprietor never lowers it; high prices, the scarcity of labor, the disadvantages of the season, even pestilence itself, have no effect upon him why should he suffer from hard times when he does not labor? Here commences a new series of phenomena.
The socialists have not wasted the opportunity. Starting with the principle that labor is the source of all income, they began to call the holders of capital to account for their farm-rents and emoluments; and, as the economists won the first victory by generalizing under a common expression farm-rent and usury, so the socialists have taken their revenge by causing the seignorial rights of capital to vanish before the still more general principle of labor.
So that, in a community where there was but one laborer, the farm-rent would be but 0.1; no matter how great the extent and value of the land appropriated. Therefore, WITH A GIVEN LANDED CAPITAL, PRODUCTION IS PROPORTIONAL TO LABOR, NOT TO PROPERTY. Guided by this principle, let us try to ascertain the maximum increase of all property whatever. What is, essentially, a farm-lease?
Its effect is to deliver us at one blow from all the evils of property, without abolishing it, without wronging proprietors, and by a highly conservative process. We have just proved that, if the farm-rent in a community of one thousand laborers is one hundred, that of nine hundred would be ninety, that of eight hundred, eighty, that of one hundred, ten, &c.
Thoroughly utopian at its birth, it has been able to maintain and extend itself only by gradually adopting all the economic categories, labor, capital, farm-rent, usury, traffic, property; in short, by consecrating the Roman law, the highest expression of political economy.
There is an error in the estimate which needs to be corrected. Buchanan a commentator on Smith regarded farm-rent as the result of a monopoly, and maintained that labor alone is productive. Consequently, he thought that, without this monopoly, products would rise in price; and he found no basis for farm-rent save in the civil law.
Exactly there lies the monopoly of the proprietor; in the fact that, though he did not make the implement, he asks pay for its use. When the Creator shall present himself and claim farm-rent, we will consider the matter with him; or even when the proprietor his pretended representative shall exhibit his power-of-attorney. "The proprietor's service," adds Say, "is easy, I admit."
How, then, reconcile the theory of farm-rent or productivity of capital a theory confirmed by universal custom, which conservative political economy is forced to accept but cannot justify with this other theory which shows that value is normally composed of wages, and which inevitably ends, as we shall demonstrate, in an equality in society between net product and raw product?
The nine hundred laborers, sure that their future production will equal that of the past, are quite surprised, after paying their farm-rent, to find themselves poorer by one-tenth than they were the previous year.
If the master of the French economists had been less blinded by his proprietary prejudices, he would have seen that farm-rent has precisely the same effect. Take a family of peasants composed of six persons, father, mother, and four children, living in the country, and cultivating a small piece of ground.
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