In the social life of the present day, the control of capital for
the production of commodities is very closely bound up with the
ownership of the means of production, amongst which capital is of
course included. And yet these two relations between man and capital
are quite different as regards the way they operate within the social
system. The control of capital by individual ability is, when suitably
applied, a means of enriching the body social with wealth which it is
to everyone's interest should exist. Whatever a person's position in
life, it is to his interest that nothing should be wasted of those
individual abilities which flow from the fountain-head of human
nature, and through which things are created that are of use to
the life of man. These abilities, however, never become developed,
unless the human beings endowed with them have free initiative in
their exercise. Any check to the free flow from these sources means
a certain measure of loss to the welfare of mankind. Now capital is
the means of making these abilities available for extended fields
of social life. It must be to the true interests of everybody in a
community to have the collective property in capital so administered,
that individuals specially gifted in one direction, or groups of
people with special qualifications, should be able to acquire the
use of capital, and should use it in the way their own particular
initiative prompts them. Everybody, be he brainworker or labourer, if
he consults his own interests without prejudice, must say: "I should
not only wish an adequate number of persons, or groups of persons,
to have absolutely free use of capital, but I should also like them
to have access to capital on their own initiative; for they themselves
are the best judges of how their particular abilities can make capital
a means of producing what is useful to the body social."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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