An Inquiry Into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness: Applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth

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Longsman, Hurst, Ross, Orme, Brown and Green, 1824 - Economics - 600 pages
 

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Page 145 - ... plunder, it would remain still, under such circumstances, to supply motives to production. This is the real difficulty; which Mr. Owen conceives he has solved. Conceding therefore so much on the one hand, we must strictly guard, on the other, against the abuses and false inferences that may be drawn from this concession. Wherever inequality is not called for by the clear necessity of security, not of that false security which is partially applied to soothe the imaginary alarms of the rich, protecting...
Page 272 - The man of knowledge and the productive labourer come to be widely divided from each other, and knowledge, instead of remaining the handmaid of labour in the hand of the labourer to increase his productive powers . . . has almost everywhere arrayed itself against labour . . . systematically deluding and leading them (the labourers) astray in order to render their muscular powers entirely mechanical and obedient.
Page 169 - The productive laborers stript of all capital, of tools, houses, and materials to make their labor productive, toil from want, from the necessity of existence, their remuneration being kept at the lowest compatible with the existence of industrious habits.
Page 592 - As long as the accumulated capital of society remains in one set of hands, and the productive power of creating wealth remains in another, the accumulated capital will, while the nature of man continues as at present, be made use of to counteract the natural laws of distribution, and to deprive the producers of the use of what their labour has produced. Were it possible to conceive that, under...
Page 182 - The keenest pangs the wretched find Are rapture to the dreary void, The leafless desert of the mind, The waste of feelings unemploy'd.
Page 206 - At length, however, the sickly ardor of fashion relaxes, the bauble, become old or familiar, ceases to please, and the trade in the superfluity so lately active, is now comparatively at a stand. On the fixed and moveable capital employed during the great demand, there must be more or less of loss in transferring it to other employment.
Page viii - ... to social science, the application of which becomes the art of social happiness, it is necessary always to keep in view, the complicated nature of man, the instrument to operate with and the creature to be operated upon.
Page 165 - The measure of the capitalist, on the contrary, would be the additional value produced by the same quantity of labour in consequence of the use of machinery...
Page 423 - Insult not the suffering, the great majority of mankind, with the glaring falsehood, that by means of limiting population or not eating potatoes their own happiness is in their own hands, whilst the causes are left which render it morally and physically impossible for them to live without potatoes and improvident breeding.
Page 369 - In medicine, it is the interest of the physician to cure diseases, but to cure them as slowly and with as much profit as the competition of other medical men will permit. It is the interest of all medical men that diseases should exist and prevail, or their trade would be decreased ten or one hundred fold.

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