Functional socialism

122 FUNCTIONAL SOCIALISM

land be in excess of the demand. “For no one would pay for the use of land when there was an abundant quantity not yet appropriated.” Rent appears “when the progress of population calls into cultivation land of an inferior quality or less advantageously situated”’. He makes a cryptic remark upon rent: “It is a creation of value, not of wealth’. But what did he mean by value?

Never in the history of economic doctrine did a theory cause such ferment and anger. The landowning class, with all its parasitic sycophants, was shocked; it was not heresy, it was blasphemy. I am no Ricardian; I think that Carey, the American economist, at least argues a better case; but from Ricardo descended a progeny of ideas upon land tenure, many still alive and fruitful. James Mill, father of John Stuart Mill, became a convert, subsequently influencing his son. His energies were turned to land nationalization. Henry George went to the same spring and we know how pre-occupied was Marx with Ricardo. Moreover, we may gently remark that, when agriculture enters a functional society, it will be not with a nimbus of physiocratic mumbo-jumbo, but of science and service.

Yet another group—the Socialists in general and the Guild Socialists in particular—went to Ricardo, not for inspiration but for ammunition. For nowhere else is the wage contract described with such stark brutality—so brutal that only a gentle soul could have written it.

Jacques Necker, the rich partner in the house of