Sublime

An even more ferocious enemy of the family is the factory.

The revenue of the farmer is derived partly from his labour, and partly from his stock.

In that early and rude state of society which precedes both the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land, the proportion between the quantities of labour necessary for acquiring different objects, seems to be the only circumstance which can afford any rule for exchanging them for one another. If among a nation of hunters, for example, it

Yet nearly 250 years after Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, the publication most committed to defending his legacy was now uncertain whether one of the central premises of his thinking would endure for much longer. Such doubt resides at the very heart of what the Third Disruption means. If capital can become labour – if tools produced by humans c

further

Unlike Marx, Keynes viewed capitalism as inevitably shifting to greater abundance, this resulting from its ability to become ever more productive over time while reducing the demand for labour. In Economic Possibilities his claim was that this would translate to a shorter working week, with improvements in productivity as technology progressed bene

A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment. In the long run, the workman may be as necessary to

The Swiss Protestant reformer Zwingli was even more explicit. God, he argued, gave us the divine law: to love thy neighbor as thyself. If we truly kept this law, humans would give freely to one another, and private property would not exist. However, Jesus excepted, no human being has ever been able to live up to this pure communistic standard. Ther

regimentation of the poor was the relapse of barbarians into slavery. I can see no escape from it for ourselves in the ruts of our present reforms, but only by doing what the mediaevals did after the other barbarian defeat: beginning, by guilds and small independent groups, gradually to restore the personal property of the poor and the personal fre