remains will be, no doubt, considerable, but yet, when compared to the
entire capital of the country, annually reproduced and dispensed in
wages, it is very much smaller than it appears to the popular
imagination; and were the whole of it added to the share of the
laborers it would make a less addition to that share than would be
made by any important invention in machinery, or by the suppression of
unnecessary distributors and other "parasites of industry." To
complete the estimate, however, of the portion of the produce of
industry which goes to remunerate capital we must not stop at the
interest earned out of the produce by the capital actually employed in
producing it, but must include that which is paid to the former owners
of capital which has been unproductively spent and no longer exists,
and is paid, of course, out of the produce of other capital. Of this
nature is the interest of national debts, which is the cost a nation
is burthened with for past difficulties and dangers, or for past folly
or profligacy of its rulers, more or less shared by the nation itself.
To this must be added the interest on the debts of landowners and
other unproductive consumers; except so far as the money borrowed may
have been spent in remunerative improvement of the productive powers
of the land. As for landed property itself--the appropriation of the
rent of land by private individuals--I reserve, as I have said, this
question for discussion hereafter; for the tenure of land might be
varied in any manner considered desirable, all the land might be
declared the property of the State, without interfering with the right
of property in anything which is the product of human labor and
abstinence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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