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"If you were a racehorse, it might be a matter of reasonable pride to you to be bred in the purple. Being a man with no avocation except the spending of unearned money, it means that you are perilously over-sensitized." "What unpleasant pedantry are you leading up to?" I demanded. "Out with it." "I mean to. You have the artistic temperament which, without genius, is worse than useless.
This is not a reaction when compared to the present world status of non-Socialist land reform, for the taxation of unearned increment has not yet been extended to agricultural land in use, but it is decidedly a reaction when compared with the Socialists' own position in the past.
And these will thrive so long as men seek health or fortune with closed eyes and open hands. In no way has the unearned increment been more mischievous than in the booming of towns. With the growth of towns comes increase in the value of the holdings of those who hold and wait. If the city grows rapidly enough, these gains may be inordinately great.
At a very early stage the "ants" stored away what they could spare, while the "grasshoppers" had a "good time". Investing their stored wealth in land or productive enterprises the "ants" added unearned income to their normal earnings from productive labor. Because the "ants" held the wealth of the community they were able to exercise authority and determine community policy.
The sunshine was around them, and the peace of the open places. They sat for the world to see them, and there was nothing to hide in the sympathy that moved Dr. Slavens to reach out and take the girl's hand. He caressed it with comforting touch, as if to mitigate the suffering of her heart, in tearing from it for his eyes to see, her hoarded sorrow and unearned shame.
He was not given his generous landed patrimony in order that he should sit idly by and wait for the unearned increment to come. Many of the seigneurs fulfilled this trust to the letter. Robert Giffard, who received the seigneury of Beauport just below Quebec, was one of these; Charles Le Moyne, Sieur de Longueuil, was another.
Even if we deduct from the total profits his pay for technical and administrative superintendence, this unearned surplus-product still remains. Land, abandoned to the sun and the rain, does not, of itself, produce either wheat or wine. Minerals do not come forth, unaided, from the bowels of the earth. A bag of dollars shut up in a safe does not produce dollars, as a cow produces calves.
There is a pretty steady determination, which I am convinced will become effective in the present Parliament, to intercept all future unearned increment which may arise from the increase in the speculative value of the land. There will be an ever-widening area of municipal enterprise.
I reminded Margaret that she was not altogether innocent of unearned increment. "But aren't we doing our best to give it back?" she said. I was moved to question her. "Do you really think," I asked, "that the Tories and peers and rich people are to blame for social injustice as we have it to-day? Do you really see politics as a struggle of light on the Liberal side against darkness on the Tory?"
Thus, so far as these special men are concerned, the alleged difference between earned income and unearned altogether disappears; and if one man lives in luxury for sixty years on the interest of an invention which it took him but a month to perfect, while another man every day has to toil for his daily bread, the difference between the two consists not in the fact that the one man works for his bread and the other man does nothing for it, but in the fact that the work of one produces more in a day than that of the other would do in a hundred lifetimes.
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