CHAPTER XXII. EVILS OF MONOPOLIES AND EXPLOITATIONS OF INDUSTRIES.
False Principle of Law-made Property—Absurdity of Funding System and Borrowing from Investors—Evil of Public Works in hands of Profitmongers and Speculators—Rapacity of Predatory Classes—Efforts of Robespierre to abolish the nefarious System—his legal Assassination in consequence—All Evils of Society the work of Landlords and Profitmongers.
Another false principle at the root of our system (mark it well! for it is a most diabolical one) is, that laws may legitimately make property for one set of people at the expense of another set, without the consent of the latter, and without giving them an equivalent. This principle lurks insidiously at the root of scores of different sorts of property, well known to exist in this country, and to be wholly and solely the offspring of class-legislation. The dividends payable on the National Debt are of this class of property; so are railway dividends; so are the dividends or revenues accruing from canals, docks, wharfs, fisheries, insurance offices, gas-companies, water-companies, mining-companies, and private companies of all sorts, which are chartered by private Acts of Parliament to do for the public what the public ought to be empowered to do for themselves. There is no subject upon which more gross and general ignorance prevails than upon this. Most people imagine that a man may as legitimately possess property of the kinds here alluded to, as he may possess a house, a horse, or a gross of Birmingham buttons. No delusion can be more ridiculous. Parliaments are chosen, and laws are designed, not to make property for people, but to protect it for those who have made it for themselves, or obtained it from those that did. If a man builds a house, or buys an ox, it is his rightful property irrespectively of Acts of Parliament. The law did not give him the house or the ox; neither has it a right to take it away, unless for a good and sufficient reason, and then only upon awarding adequate compensation. The same principle applies to every other legitimate description of property. All such legitimate descriptions of property are acquired or made by the owners themselves, and not by the law. The law only protects such property; it does not create or make it.
The State plan of borrowing money from its subjects on the perpetual-interest system is replete with folly and extravagance; unless it be admitted to be an artful scheme for robbing the wealth-producers, by taxing them with the payment of the interest of money which they never borrowed. An honest government would quickly set about paying this debt off, by offering life annuities to a certain number of stock-holders every year. A real State power ought never to borrow money; it ought to make it when required to cancel its obligations, receiving the same money back in the form of taxes, so as to prevent depreciation. The government practice of borrowing money on Exchequer bills is also absurdly wasteful; surely the credit of the State ought to be above that of any of its subjects!
What is true of funded property is equally applicable to the various other descriptions of property referred to. Railroads should not be private property; neither should canals, docks, fisheries, mines, the supplying of gas, water, etc. Works of this sort, designed for the use of the public, should be constructed or executed only at the public cost, and the public, and the public only, should have the advantage. They should not be suffered to fall into the hands of private speculators, for whom they are only a legal disguise to enable them to rob the public. A universal-suffrage parliament would never sanction such a system, unless it were stark mad. Like the funding system, it only tends to breed idle schemers to prey upon the industrious classes. All profits upon their outlay received by such private companies, while they preserve their capital intact, is in reality so much public plunder handed over to them by the law. Indeed, not unfrequently the profits for a single year are greater than the outlay itself, whilst the original shares are proportionately enhanced in value. Thus, shares in the New River Company, originally worth £100, are now worth £16,000; in other words, the annual interest is equal to eight times the original capital. It is superfluous to say such property is the sole creation of law, which, whenever it deviates from its original function of protecting property, to that of creating or making it, only robs one set of people to enrich another—a species of act which laws are intended to punish, and not to set the example of.