The other natural proprietary rights are consequent in one way or
another upon labour. First, there is the right to labour. If every man
has a right to a share in the dominion of nature, then every man who is
able to labour has a right to obtain the natural resources that are
necessary to give him employment according to capacity and trade. No
private appropriation of these resources can divest him of his title to
get access to them, and if he cannot find work himself, the State is
bound to provide it for him in public workshops. Second, every man has a
right to the most profitable possible application of labour to natural
resources. He has an interest in seeing the common stock put to the best
account, and he is wronged in this interest when waste is permitted,
when inferior methods are resorted to, or when the distribution of work
and materials is ill arranged. Now the best arrangement is when each man
is equipped according to the measure and quality of his powers. Nature
will be then best worked, and man's personal development will then be
best furthered. If such an arrangement cannot be effected on the system
of property now in vogue, while it may be under another, it is every
man's right to have the former system supplanted by the latter. The most
economical form of property is the most just. Third, the next right is a
right to an almost unlimited control over the fruits of one's own
labour. Not over the means of labour; these can only be justly or
economically held by a circumscribed control; but over the fruits of
labour. These ought to be retained as exclusive property, for the simple
reason that the natural resources will be so turned to the best account.
On any other system of payment the motive to labour is impaired, and the
amount of its produce diminished. Distribution by need defeats its own
end; the very needs of the community would be less amply satisfied after
it than before it. Distribution according to work is the sound economic
principle, and therefore the just one. Marlo here leaves room for the
play of the hereditary principle and of competition to some extent, and
he allows the free choice of occupation on similar grounds. Men will
work best in lines their own tastes and powers lead them to. Everything
is determined by economic utility, and economic utility is supposed to
be at its height when the natural resources of a country are distributed
among its inhabitants according to the requirements of their labouring
powers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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