Archive for Category: "Hilaire Belloc"
The Restoration of Property
The change in philosophy is our root difficulty, but the second is that it has produced a certain state of society. It is a state in which by far the greater part of men are attuned to being wage slaves, that is, a state of society in which a man is more afraid of losing his job than of anything else.
The Guild System
Every kind of good would flow from the re-establishment of the Guild, and without the re-establishment of the Guild the effort to maintain well-distributed property, even if we had already achieved that good distribution, would be vain.
Communism Has Failed
There are four main proposals offered for setting things right again. The first three are false remedies, the fourth is the true remedy, which is the restoration of property, the building up of economic freedom for the mass of men, and the re-creating that independence of the family which industrial capitalism has destroyed.
The Differential Tax
The principle of the Differential Tax is that a different proportion of taxation, as well as a different amount, may be applied to men in different circumstances. It has a chief function to perform in the disintegrating of large accumulations and the consequent fostering of small accumulations.
Property
The idea of the Guild has almost died out because the anarchy and greed of the modern world has destroyed the thing, but there is nothing to prevent its being restored.
Capital Kills Its Own Market
All the older people can remember real competition and a fairly good division of property…if we do not bring about a reform in time, the second generation after our own will have forgotten what economic freedom is.
The Proletarian Mind
The proletarian mind loses the sense of home for a proletariat has no roots. It drifts from place to place. Its habitation is “the labor market.” It inherits nothing and has no hope of handing on anything to posterity.
Ruin of the Small Store Owner
Whether he be the small free owning farmer, or the small free craftsman carpenter, smith or what not, owning his own home and shop and tools, his numbers are rapidly getting less and we are making for his extinction.
The Wage Worker
Our industrial society has become divided into a very large body which lives wholly, or almost wholly, on wages, that is on food, clothing, and housing doled out to it at short intervals by a much smaller number of paymasters, who control capital.