profits), interest includes all non-differential unearned incomes, and thus the State is to be endowed, not with rents alone, but with all unearned incomes.[52] It is true that the Fabians, throwing over Marx’s inaccurate term “surplus value,” base their Socialism on the Law of Rent, because, as they allege, this law negatives both equality of income and earnings in proportion to labour, so long as private ownership of land prevails.  It is also true that they have directed special attention to the unearned incomes of the “idle” landlord and shareholder, because these are the typical feature of the modern system of distribution, which indeed has come to the front since the time of Marx, and because they furnish the answer to those who contend that wealth is at present distributed approximately in accordance with personal capacity or merit, and tacitly assume that “the rich” are all of them great captains of industry who by enterprise and ability have actually created their vast fortunes.[53] Indeed we might say that we do not mind conceding to our opponents all the wealth “created” by superior brains, if they will let us deal with the unearned incomes which are received independent of the possession of any brains, or any services at all!

But although we regard the case of the capitalist employer as relatively negligible, and although we prefer to concentrate our attack on the least defensible side of the capitalist system—­and already the State recognises that unearned incomes should pay a larger proportion in income-tax, that property which passes at death, necessarily to those who have not earned it, should contribute a large quota to the public purse, and that unearned increment on land should in part belong to the public—­that does not mean that we have any tenderness for the entrepreneur.  Him we propose to deal with by the favourite Fabian method of municipalisation and nationalisation.  We take over his “enterprise,” his gasworks and waterworks, his docks and trams, his railways and mines.  We secure for the State the profits of management and the future unearned increment, and we compensate him for his capital with interest-bearing securities.  We force him in fact to become the idle recipient of unearned income, and then we turn round and upbraid him and tax him heavily precisely because his income is unearned!  If there is any special tenderness in this treatment, I should prefer harshness.  To me it seems to resemble the policy of the wolf towards the lamb.[54]

I will proceed with quotations from Mr. Barker, because the view of a historian of thought is weightier than anything I could say.