It is when we come to the question of the proportions in which we are to
redistribute that controversy begins. We are bewildered by an absurdly
unpractical notion that in some way a man's income should be given to
him, not to enable him to live, but as a sort of Sunday School Prize for
good behavior. And this folly is complicated by a less ridiculous but
quite as unpractical belief that it is possible to assign to each person
the exact portion of the national income that he or she has produced.
To a child it seems that the blacksmith has made a horse-shoe, and
that therefore the horse-shoe is his. But the blacksmith knows that the
horse-shoe does not belong solely to him, but to his landlord, to the
rate collector and taxgatherer, to the men from whom he bought the iron
and anvil and the coals, leaving only a scrap of its value for himself;
and this scrap he has to exchange with the butcher and baker and the
clothier for the things that he really appropriates as living tissue or
its wrappings, paying for all of them more than their cost; for these
fellow traders of his have also their landlords and moneylenders to
satisfy. If, then, such simple and direct village examples of apparent
individual production turn out on a moment's examination to be the
products of an elaborate social organization, what is to be said of such
products as dreadnoughts, factory-made pins and needles, and steel pens?
If God takes the dreadnought in one hand and a steel pen in the other,
and asks Job who made them, and to whom they should belong by maker's
right, Job must scratch his puzzled head with a potsherd and be dumb,
unless indeed it strikes him that God is the ultimate maker, and that
all we have a right to do with the product is to feed his lambs.