In the late 1860s, the English political economist William
Thomas Thornton published On Labour: Its
Wrongful Claims and Rightful Dues, Its Actual Present and Possible Future,
which he revised in 1870. In the book,
Thornton recognized that both workers and owners of capital have rights. The problem was how to sort them out and deal
with everyone justly.
The problem, as more than one authority has pointed out, is
that the effect of advancing technology is to replace human labor in the
production process. After all, why else
would someone use a machine instead of human labor if there were no benefit to
doing so?
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| A "Clodhopper" (no, really!) |
There is no problem with advancing technology if you are
replacing your own labor. You can dig up
a quarter acre of land a day if you work really hard. You can plow an entire field in a day with an
ox. You can plow several fields a day
with a tractor.
The problem is when an owner replaces human workers with
machinery. This not only displaces some
human beings from production, and thus from their source(s) of income, but
lowers the value of all human labor as a factor of production relative to
capital.
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| Louis O. Kelso |
The solution, of course (at least as Thornton and, later, Louis
O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler saw it), is not to take away what rightfully
belongs to the owner of capital, . . . but to make the propertyless worker into
a capital owner! Yes, advancing
technology is a great benefit to you . . . but
only if you own the advancing technology!
This is why ownership of capital is as important to human
dignity as recognizing the inherent dignity of human labor. That is, in fact, one reason why we got
“Labor Day” in the late 19th century. People were fully aware that capital owners
had dignity. Their rights were
respected; the natural right to be an owner, and the bundle of socially defined
rights limiting what an owner could do with what was owned were part and parcel
of what it meant to be an American.
The problem was that, as the “free land” under the Homestead
Act came to an effective end in the 1890s — something that was apparent by 1887
when Labor Day became a holiday — more and more people were being forced into
the wage system. Without the option to
go west and take land, it became essential to stress the fact that wage workers
were equal in dignity to capital owners, and to begin protecting and
maintaining that dignity with the same force of law that protected capital
owners.
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| Judge Peter S. Grosscup |
Protecting the dignity of labor with the power of the State,
however, was (and could only be) a stopgap, an expedient on the way to a
society in which propertyless workers could become capital owners, and protect
their own dignity with the power that “naturally and necessarily follows
property.” This is why authorities as
diverse as Judge Peter S. Grosscup and Pope Leo XIII advocated developing some
plan that would assist propertyless workers becoming property owners. As the pope declared in § 46 of Rerum Novarum,
“We have seen that
this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that
private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore,
should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible
of the people to become owners.”