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
Next in simplicity to “that original state of things,” of which many
examples may yet be found, where the whole produce of labor belongs to
the laborer, is the arrangement in which the laborer, though working
for another person, or with the capital of another person, receives
his wages in kind—that is to say, in the things his labor produces. In
this case it is as clear as in the case of the self-employing laborer
that the wages are really drawn from the product of the labor, and not
at all from capital. If I hire a man to gather eggs, to pick berries,
or to make shoes, paying him from the eggs, the berries, or the shoes
that his labor secures, there can be no question that the source of
the wages is the labor for which they are paid. Of this form of hiring
is the saer-and-daer stock tenancy, treated of with such perspicuity
by Sir Henry Maine in his “Early History of Institutions,” and which
so clearly involved the relation of employer and employed as to render
the acceptor of cattle the man or vassal of the capitalist who thus
employed him. It was on such terms as these that Jacob worked for
Laban, and to this day, even in civilized countries, it is not an
infrequent mode of employing labor. The farming of land on shares,
which prevails to a considerable extent in the Southern States of the
Union and in California, the metayer system of Europe, as well as the
many cases in which superintendents, salesmen, etc., are paid by a
percentage of profits, what are they but the employment of labor for
wages which consist of part of its produce?
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