In the end you are forced to ask the question you should have asked at
the beginning. What do you give a man an income for? Obviously to keep
him alive. Since it is evident that the first condition on which he can
be kept alive without enslaving somebody else is that he shall produce
an equivalent for what it costs to keep him alive, we may quite
rationally compel him to abstain from idling by whatever means we employ
to compel him to abstain from murder, arson, forgery, or any other
crime. The one supremely foolish thing to do with him is to do nothing;
that is, to be as idle, lazy, and heartless in dealing with him as he is
in dealing with us. Even if we provided work for him instead of basing,
as we do, our whole industrial system on successive competitive waves
of overwork with their ensuing troughs of unemployment, we should still
sternly deny him the alternative of not doing it; for the result must be
that he will become poor and make his children poor if he has any; and
poor people are cancers in the commonwealth, costing far more than if
they were handsomely pensioned off as incurables. Jesus had more sense
than to propose anything of the sort. He said to his disciples, in
effect, "Do your work for love; and let the other people lodge and
feed and clothe you for love." Or, as we should put it nowadays, "for
nothing." All human experience and all natural uncommercialized human
aspiration point to this as the right path. The Greeks said, "First
secure an independent income; and then practise virtue." We all strive
towards an independent income. We all know as well as Jesus did that
if we have to take thought for the morrow as to whether there shall be
anything to eat or drink it will be impossible for us to think of nobler
things, or live a higher life than that of a mole, whose life is from
beginning to end a frenzied pursuit of food. Until the community is
organized in such a way that the fear of bodily want is forgotten as
completely as the fear of wolves already is in civilized capitals, we
shall never have a decent social life. Indeed the whole attraction of
our present arrangements lies in the fact that they do relieve a
handful of us from this fear; but as the relief is effected stupidly and
wickedly by making the favored handful parasitic on the rest, they are
smitten with the degeneracy which seems to be the inevitable biological
penalty of complete parasitism, and corrupt culture and statecraft
instead of contributing to them, their excessive leisure being as
mischievous as the excessive toil of the laborers. Anyhow, the moral
is clear. The two main problems of organized society, how to secure the
subsistence of all its members, and how to prevent the theft of that
subsistence by idlers, should be entirely dissociated; and the practical
failure of one of them to automatically achieve the other recognized
and acted on. We may not all have Jesus's psychological power of seeing,
without any enlightenment from more modern economic phenomena, that they
must fail; but we have the hard fact before us that they do fail. The
only people who cling to the lazy delusion that it is possible to find
a just distribution that will work automatically are those who postulate
some revolutionary change like land nationalization, which by itself
would obviously only force into greater urgency the problem of how to
distribute the product of the land among all the individuals in the
community.