University of Santa Clara - Redwood Yearbook (Santa Clara, CA)

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THE REDWOOD. The first argument I shall take from Mr. Sidney Webb. He correctly main- tains that exceptional ability is a pow- erful factor in the production of wealth, but, he says, exceptional productive ability has no right to any exceptional share of the products. To substantiate this statement he says : The special ability or energy witn which some per- sons are born is an unearned increment due to the effect of the struggle for ex- istence on their ancestors, and conse- quently having been produced by so- ciety is as much due to society as the unearned increment of rent. By this, our intellectual friend means to say that the man of ability inherited his superiority from his ancestors. That his ancestors acquired their superiority in their struggle for existence with the rest of humanity. The ' ' rest of human- ity was the stone upon which the knife was whetted, therefore to the rest of humanity is due the superiority just as much as to the ancestors themselves. The rest of humanity may claim an equal share with Ability for they were co-partners in the production of that Ability. But to admit such an argument would lead to a multitude of absurdit- ies. If the man of genius owes his abil- ity to society, then the criminal owes his degeneracy to the same source, and society may not with justice punish him, for they have an equal share in his crime. He who comes into court must come with clean hands. Likewise if two rival teams are running for a grand prize the defeated members after the race may approach their victors with the argument that they, the victors, had acquired their fleet-footedness by the experience gained in running against them, the losers, in former times, that therefore justice required the victors to share the prize for the losers con- duced to win the prize as much as their victors themselves. Similarly the idle man owes his indolence to society and therefore, though he does nothing he is entitled to an equal share. But let us turn to the second argu- ment of the new school in the hope that it may be more plausible than the former. This second argument has been cull- ed from the pages of John Stuart Mill, the most celebrated of the orthodox economists, who while not a Socialist himself, strangely enough furnished them with one of their strongest argu- ments. It is not necessary that we explain Mill ' s application of the argu- ment to land and labor. It will suf- fice to elucidate the Fabian application of it to ability and labor. Recalling that this school of Socialists admit individ- ual ability as well as labor as a produc- er of capital it is curious to note the manner in which they attempt to min- imize the value of the former. They say: Labor and Ability are two fac- tors, their product is wealth. But we can no more determine which of these two factors produces the greater part of wealth than we can tell which of the two factors five or six has most to do in

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THE REDWOOD. wealth on the Socialistic plan would be a gross injustice, for it would give to the laborer that which is not his own and would rob from the man of ability the fruit of his own creative genius. There is in England today, however, a more thoughtful school of Socialists whose arguments are far more subtle than those proposed by the Marxian school. I refer to the Fabian society, whose intellectual headlights are such men as George Bernard Shaw, Mr. Sid- ney Webb and J. Ramsey McDonald, M. P. These men are wont to look upon Marx as the German Monists look up- on Darwin. They credit him only with the embryonic idea. His teaching was merely the nucleus of a greater, which was to evolve out of it. Economic de- terminism only reflected the material- istic doctrine of the age, they say, and it is not essential to the movement. They admit Ability as a factor in the creation of wealth and all that they de- sire is to see by a system of gradual increases in taxes the slow but sure turning over to the central government all the means of production. They ab- hor, likewise, the revolutionary meas- ures of confiscation proposed by the proponents of the popular branch of Socialism. They see a gross injustice to the laborer under the present system of production and they propose to erad- icate it by an identical system of Col- Cf. The Soc. Movement, J. R. McDonald, M. P., p. 142. lectivism in which all members of so- ciety shall share equally. But although their methods dififer the two factions are unanimous as to the ultimate goal. Likewise, although their arguments differ, they both as- sume the injustice of the present sys- tem whereby the laborer is robbed of his just deserts. Under this more recent school of So- cialism, however, the movement has been given a sudden impetus. The sub- tilty of their arguments and the unas- suming and conservative manner in which they propose to bring about their Utopia, has won many to their cause. It will not be amiss, therefore to ex- amine their line of argument and see whether or not their claims are justi- fied. The Fabians, being of a more thoughtful type than their Marxian comrades, have been forced to admit that labor is not the only source of wealth, but that Ability also is a po- tent productive agent. The trend of their reasoning therefore has been to establish a premise which will show why Ability as a factor in production is entitled to no more than labor. The arguments, of course, are many, but it will fulfill our purpose if we take a couple of the most important and ex- pose their fallacies, demonstrating that the Fabian claims of injustice are false and that the present system, though open to abuse, is at least closer to the principles of natural justice than the spectre which they propose.

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THE REDWOOD. the production of thirty. Therefore to each let us give share and share ahke. This indeed is a plausible argument, but we shall find it based on a false as- sumption. Consider for a moment a simple illustration. A. is a man who is at the head, let us say, of a great peach-packing industry, the only one in the world. He has un- der him ten thousand employes. Now for the past ten years he has annually packed one million crates of peaches. This is his maximum capacity and al- though there is a greater supply of peaches he cannot succeed in pack- ing more with his present equipment. Let us now suppose that A. is taken seriously ill and B, his office man, sub- stitutes. During the year in which B manages the system two million crates of peaches are packed with the same number of employes and with the same tools of production. After a regime of one year A again assumes the manager- ship and returning to his own system succeeds in packing but one million crates for the ensuing year and so on for the following years of his manager- ship. Since both A. and B. used the same establishment, the same employes and the same means of production it is clear that the increased capacity of the industry under the regime of B was due simply and solely to his special ability in systematization and to his superior directive powers. Returning now to the Fabian argu- ment it will be seen that what they have overlooked is the fact that capital cannot be represented by a product such as thirty, for although yesterday it was thirty, tomorrow it will be sixty, and the day after perhaps one hun- dred, and though one of these factors five, remains constant, the other varies from six to twelve to twenty and so on. In like manner although labor remains more or less constant Ability varies and therefore we can determine which of the two produces the greater part of wealth. Since we are able to do this, justice and the natural law demand that we render unto Caesar the things which belong to Caesar and we are right in giving to the greater producer the greater share of the spoils. We are safe in stating therefore that the Fa- bian claims for the injustice of the present order are false. We have already examined the main arguments advanced by the two great schools of Socialism by which they claim to have demonstrated the injus- tice of the present order of distribution, and we have found them wanting in soundness. Therefore we might here make an application of the saying of the old Ro- man legists: Cessante ratione; cessat ipsa lex and say that since all the reasons for the change are a falsity, the necessity of the change itself is a fal- sity and we might consider the ques- tion settled once and for all. There is, however, a vast army of men and women to whom arguments of this nature do not appeal and it is mainly to them that the leaders of the