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Title:  Confiscation, An Outline

Author:  William Greenwood

May, 2001  [Etext #2611]
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Confiscation
An Outline



WILLIAM GREENWOOD


Those Palaces on the Nob Hills of these United States; are the
toadstools of the decay that is going on in this Republic today. - Page
42.




PREFACE.

The Emancipation Proclamation has only 718 words.

Lincoln's address at Gettysburg has only 266 Words.

The works of Thomas Paine were not only one of the important factors
that brought success to the struggle for Independence, but they were
also largely instrumental in the Declaration itself being made. And
those works, what were they? - mere pamphlets.

Shakespeare, whose writings are said to be an education in themselves,
can be had in a volume not twice the size of "Progress and Poverty."

Why, then, cannot a scheme of political economy, even when it is a
radical departure from our present system, be sufficiently outlined for
working purposes in a volume of this size, and also written so that it
shall be intelligible to those to whom all such works should in a
Republic be addressed; namely, the voter, who alone has the power to
bring about the desired change?

The late Professor Tyndall was both an original investigator of natural
phenomena and a teacher who could make his discoveries plain to the
ordinary mind as he could to the scientist working in the same field as
himself.

Discovering a truth in Nature or in political economies is work only
half done if the discoverer wishes to make it known to those in whose
interest he claims to be working.

Labor, iron labor, makes the scholar, says Emerson.

Labor, iron labor, gave Tyndall the faculty that, made him intelligible
and interesting to the young, and the right to preside at a meeting of
Humboldts.

But there is pride of intellect as well as pride of riches, and none
shows this pride as do the writers on political economy who have made it
the "dismal science," instead of having made it the A, B, C of our
mental furniture, as it should be with the people of a republic.

Making a good use of our means in our home and business affairs is good
economics.

Making a poor use of them is bad economics.

That is all there is to this word, whether it is our private affairs or
those of the nation that are being considered.

If we live up to our laws, and yet want and privation exist while there
is more than sufficient for all, then the fault must, be in those laws.

Making a scapegoat of the foreigner for those conditions because he will
not buy our wheat, or use a metal that we have an overplus of, places us
side by side with the witch-burner of old. We are just as ignorant in
one way, as he was in another.

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