Progress and Poverty, Volumes I and II: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of WealthGeorge, Henry
General
Progress and Poverty, Volumes I and II: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth
George, Henry
Economics; Single tax
Of course, labor is necessary to exchange, as it is to the utilization
of the reproductive forces of nature, and the produce of exchange,
as the produce of agriculture, is clearly the produce of labor; but
yet, in the one case as in the other, there is a distinguishable force
cooperating with that of labor, which makes it impossible to measure
the result solely by the amount of labor expended, but renders the
amount of capital and the time it is in use integral parts in the
sum of forces. Capital aids labor in all of the different modes of
production, but there is a distinction between the relations of the two
in such modes of production as consist merely of changing the form or
place of matter, as planing boards or mining coal; and such modes of
production as avail themselves of the reproductive forces of nature, or
of the power of increase arising from differences in the distribution
of natural and human powers, such as the raising of grain or the
exchange of ice for sugar. In production of the first kind, labor
alone is the efficient cause; when labor stops, production stops. When
the carpenter drops his plane as the sun sets, the increase of value,
which he with his plane is producing, ceases until he begins his labor
again the following morning. When the factory bell rings for closing,
when the mine is shut down, production ends until work is resumed.
The intervening time, so far as regards production, might as well be
blotted out. The lapse of days, the change of seasons is no element in
the production that depends solely upon the amount of labor expended.
But in the other modes of production to which I have referred, and in
which the part of labor may be likened to the operations of lumbermen
who throw their logs into the stream, leaving it to the current to
carry them to the boom of the sawmill many miles below, time _is_ an
element. The seed in the ground germinates and grows while the farmer
sleeps or plows new fields, and the everflowing currents of air and
ocean bear Whittington’s cat toward the rat-tormented ruler in the
regions of romance.
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