Principles of Political Economy: Abridged with Critical, Bibliographical, and Explanatory Notes, and a Sketch of the History of Political EconomyMill, John Stuart
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Principles of Political Economy: Abridged with Critical, Bibliographical, and Explanatory Notes, and a Sketch of the History of Political Economy
Mill, John Stuart
Economics
Another of the objections to Communism is that if every member of the
community were assured of subsistence for himself and any number of
children, on the sole condition of willingness to work, prudential
restraint on the multiplication of mankind would be at an end, and
population would start forward at a rate which would reduce the community
through successive stages of increasing discomfort to actual starvation.
But Communism is precisely the state of things in which opinion might be
expected to declare itself with greatest intensity against this kind of
selfish intemperance. An augmentation of numbers which diminished the
comfort or increased the toil of the mass would then cause (which now it
does not) immediate and unmistakable inconvenience to every individual in
the association; inconvenience which could not then be imputed to the
avarice of employers, or the unjust privileges of the rich.
A more real difficulty is that of fairly apportioning the labor of the
community among its members. There are many kinds of work, and by what
standard are they to be measured one against another? Who is to judge how
much cotton-spinning, or distributing goods from the stores, or
brick-laying, or chimney-sweeping, is equivalent to so much plowing?
Besides, even in the same kind of work, nominal equality of labor would be
so great a real inequality that the feeling of justice would revolt
against its being enforced. All persons are not equally fit for all labor;
and the same quantity of labor is an unequal burden on the weak and the
strong, the hardy and the delicate, the quick and the slow, the dull and
the intelligent.(146)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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