Criminality and economic conditionsBonger, Willem Adriaan
General
Criminality and economic conditions
Bonger, Willem Adriaan
Crime -- Economic aspects
“In a rational-made society it will never exist. Whatever may have been
its necessity or utility, before the introduction of the supremacy of
machinery and chemistry, it is now most unnecessary and an unmixed
evil; for every one, from the highest to the lowest, may be ensured
through life much more of all that is really beneficial for humanity,
and the permanent happiness of the individual, through public
scientific arrangements, than it is possible to obtain through the
scramble and contest for procuring and maintaining private property.
“Private property also continually interferes with or obstructs public
measures which would greatly benefit all, and frequently to merely
please the whim or caprice of an ill-trained individual....
“With a well arranged scientific system of public property, equal
education and condition, there will be no mercenary or unequal
marriages; no spoiled children; and none of the evils which proceed
from these errors in the present system, if crudities which pervade all
the departments of life, and are thoroughly inconsistent, can be called
a system of society.
“In fact, as soon as individuals shall be educated and placed—and it is
for the best and permanent interest of society that all should be
educated and placed—the saving of time, labour, and capital, between
public and private property, will be beyond any estimate the mind of
man can form in favour of public property....
“Therefore the twelfth law [27] will be, that—
“‘Under the Rational System of society—after the children shall have
been trained to acquire new habits and new feelings, derived from a
knowledge of the laws of human nature—there shall be no useless private
property.’
“The old system of the world has been created and governed on the
assumed principle of man’s responsibility to man, and by man’s rewards
and punishments.
“And this principle has been assumed upon the original supposition,
that man was born with power to form himself into any character he
liked; to believe or disbelieve whatever he pleased; and that he could
love, hate, or be indifferent as to all persons and things, according
to an independent will which enabled him to do as he liked in all these
respects.
“The present system is, therefore, essentially a system supported and
governed by laws of punishment and reward of man’s creating, in
opposition to nature’s laws of punishing and rewarding. The former
system is artificial, and always produces crime and misery, continually
increasing, and therefore requiring new laws to correct the evils
necessarily forced upon society by the old laws; thus laws are
multiplied without limit by man to counteract nature’s laws, and ever
without success. While nature’s beautiful and benevolent laws, if
consistently acted upon in a system made throughout in accordance with
them, would produce knowledge, goodness, and happiness, continually
increasing, to the human race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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