Confiscation; An Outline

by William Greenwood

At his door who has been writing on this subject does the blame of this universal ignorance of it belong. He takes up this plain, simple subject, and becomes an intellectual aristocrat and a snob of exclusiveness from that time on, and, like the aristocrat of wealth, will have nothing further to do with the common people, cutting off all former connections by turning out a mass of intellectual mud that, only leisure and education can penetrate. And dear to him is the dignity of bulk, the dignity of paunch, using, as he does, twenty words where three would do better work. The living and the dead if his species are alike in this hunt for the "Absolutely Pure" to puff out their little dough.

Dissecting "Co-operation," the writer of Progress and Poverty must drag the poor remains through over 800 words - almost enough to bury the single tax theory itself. Co-operation means getting rid of the middleman. With organized labor it, means keeping out all whose admittance would cause a surplus of labor among those who have organized to prevent that as well as injustice by the employer. But what has become of that middleman and black-balled laborer? One is ruined and the other is a helpless chip that is drifting into - some State prison for forty years.

Co-operation is the savior of some, but the ruination of others, and her plea of justifiable homicide cannot be accepted while this earth has more than enough for her own.

Not a God-like wisdom, nor the assumption of it, is needed to either conceive a remedy for our present troubles, or to formulate laws for its application. Plain sense we most all have, let us use it, then, and we will have no further use for either the bookworm or the logic chopper.

Confiscation.

I.

Running a republic under the economic laws of a monarchy must of necessity result in producing the same conditions - great wealth for some and great poverty for the rest. This may be a government by the people, but it certainly is no longer a government for the people. Heretofore individual greed has had full swing in the United States, and naturally enough the ablest returned in possession of everything worth grabbing. And naturally enough, too, if a republic means a country owned by all its people, it cannot be a republic if it is owned by only a few. All the power of a country is bound to be in the hands of those who own it. If its wealth is in the hands of a few, its power is there with it. In the hands of a few it must be, if it would be a kingdom or empire. In the hands of all it must be, if it would be a republic. To insist on having the personal liberty that goes with a republic, and at the same time not to set a limit to the resources an individual can own, is a contradiction. A republic has economic laws that are essential to her existence. Any others mean her destruction. And it is utterly out of the question for any political party to improve the conditions of the people, while they use the present economic laws as the basis of their proposed legislation.

You must begin at the foundation. Individual greed should be made to respect the right of others to exist, and made to conform itself to laws that are as necessary to the life of a republic as is the ballot itself. The ballot, in fact, has lost its power. It is the key to a house we have lost possession of, and if we would regain possession and make the ballot something more than a mere symbol of a thing that is dead, we have no choice but to resort to the one process by which the resources of the country can be returned to its people, and the blight of poverty and pauperism that is settling down on the country and is becoming permanent can be removed - namely, confiscation.

Man, in the beginning, seeing annihilation staring him in the face, combined and gave us the Government of the Tribe; out of that developed the Despotic form; out of that developed the Constitutional Monarchy, out of which developed the Republic, the highest type of them all; and this work of development must ever go on, if we would not lapse into former conditions.

The founders of the republic could not have expected their work to so soon come to the Chinese halt that has overtaken it, until we now find ourselves floating on an ebbing sea back to the shores we thought we had forever left behind.