Functional socialism

CAPITAL 123

Thelusson, French Finance Minister, and father of Madame de Staél, in one of his post-revolution tracts, wrote: ‘Were it possible to discover a kind of food less agreeable than bread but having double its sustenance, people would then be reduced to eating but once in two days’. It would be difficult to state “the bare sustenance” theory with more graphic force; but whereas Necker was hypothetical, Ricardo was realistic. Read this: “The natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourers one with another to subsist and to perpetuate their race without either increase or diminution”. Ricardo was in frequent correspondence with Malthus, with whom he largely agreed. “There is no means of improving the lot of the worker except by limiting the number of his children. His destiny is in his own hands.” Both regretfully admitted that “moral restraint’? was not effective; they did not then talk of birth control.

Eyen though Ricardo blew to atoms the necromantic claims of landlordism, theoretically placing them on the same level as other occupations, he was not forward in pressing home his own logic. He admits—or suggests—that rent is properly a subject for special taxation. But as things were, and likely to remain in his day, the landlord could with impunity exact his rent. And this rent is a matter of indifference to the proletarian, for whilst his money wages may move in sympathy with the price of corn, his real wages remain the same. In effect, Ricardo says: the landlord seizes whatever surplus there may