One of the more challenging books I’ve read recently but worth it for the plot twist partway through. Definitely worth the read, he makes some keen observations about wealth, culture and government which still resonate today. Not sure I’m quite ready for the revolution of turnign over all private property as the sole source of tax revenue, but given how the cost of living has become such a problem in major American cities, it would be ignorant to not admit that this problem persists and seems to be worsening.

  • Wages, instead of being draw from capital, are in reality drawn from the product of the labor for which they are paid
  • Whatever is received as the result of exertion or reward is “wages”
  • Labor always adds to capital by its exertion before it takes from capital its wages
  • Capital increases the power of labor to product wealth
  • There is no warrant for the assumption that there is any tendency in population to increase faster than substinence
  • The natural order is land, labor, capital
  • Labor exerted upon land can produce wealth without capital, and in the necessary genesis of things must so produce wealth before capital can exist
  • Where natural opportunities are all monopolized, wages may be forced by competition among laborers to the minimum at which laborers will consent to reproduce
  • The increase of land values is always at the expense of labor
  • The effect of increasing population upon the distribution of wealth is to increase rent, and consequently to diminish the proportion of the produce which goes to capital and labor
  • Every improvement or invention which gives to labor the power of producting more wealth, causes an increased demand for land and its direct products, and thus tends to force down the margin of cultivation, just as would the demand caused by an increased population
  • Any increase in the power of labor, the demand for wealth being unsatisfied, will be utilized in procuring more wealth, and thus increase the demand for land
  • To command the land which is necessary to labor is to command all the fruits of labor save enough to enable labor to exist
  • There is, and always has been, a widespread belief among the more comfortable classes that the poverty and suffering of the masses is due to their lack of industry, frugality and intelligence
  • The growth of knowledge and the power of invention have multiplied the effective power of labor over and over again without increasing wages
  • Society is an organism, not a machine
  • To shift the burden of taxation from production and exchange to the value or rent of land would not merely be to give new stimulus to the production of wealth; it would be to open new opportunities. Under this system no one would care to hold land unless to use it, and land now withheld from use would everywhere be open to improvement
  • In a corrupt democracy the tendency is always to give power to the worst