Socialism As It Is | Page 8

estates, Mr. Lloyd George draws the line at 15 per cent, on the ground that a large part of the income from such estates goes into investments, and more confiscatory legislation might seriously affect the normal increase of the capital and "the available reserves of taxation" of the country.[22]
Mr. Lloyd George does not fail to guarantee to capital as a whole, "honest capital," that it will suffer no loss from his reforms. "I am not one of those who advocate confiscation," he said several years ago, "and at any rate as far as I am concerned honest capital, capital put in honest industries for the development of the industry, the trade, the commerce, of this country will have nothing to fear from any proposal I shall ever be responsible for submitting to the Parliament of this realm." (My italics.)[23]
Mr. Lloyd George is well justified, then, in ridiculing the idea that he is waging war against industry or property or trying to destroy riches. He not only disproves this accusation by pointing to the capitalist character of his collectivist program, but boasts that the richest men in the House of Commons are on the Liberal side, together with hundreds of thousands of the men who are building up trade and business.
And the attitude of the Radicals of the present British government is the same as that of capitalist collectivists elsewhere. However certain vested interests may suffer, there is nowhere any tendency to weaken capitalism as a whole. Capitalism is to be the chief beneficiary of the new movement.
There are many differences of opinion, however, as to the ultimate effect of the collectivist program. In Great Britain, which gives us our best illustration, there are Liberals who claim that it is Socialistic and others who deny that it has anything to do with Socialism; Conservatives who accept part of the program, and others who reject the whole as being Socialistic; Socialists, who claim that their ideas have been incorporated in the last two Budgets, and other Socialists who deny that either had anything in common with their principles.
While it is certain that the present policy of the British government is by no means directed against the power or interests of the capitalist class as a whole, and in no way resembles that of the Socialists, were not Socialist arguments used to support the government's position, and may not these lead towards a Socialist policy?
Certainly some of the principles laid down seem at first sight to have been Socialistic enough. For example, when Mr. Churchill said that incomes from dividends, rent, and interest are unearned, or when Mr. Lloyd George cried out: "Who is responsible for the scheme of things whereby one man is engaged through life in grinding labor to win a bare and precarious subsistence for himself, and when, at the end of his days, he claims at the hands of the community he served, a poor pension of eight pence a day, he can only get it through a revolution, and another man who does not toil receives every hour of the day, every hour of the night, whilst he slumbers, more than his poor neighbor receives in a whole year of toil? Where did the table of that law come from? Whose fingers inscribed it?"[24]
Lord Rosebery has pointed to the extremely radical nature of Mr. Lloyd George's arguments. The representatives of the Government had urged, he said, that the land should be taxed without mercy:--
"(1) because its existence is not due to the owner;
"(2) because it is limited in quantity;
"(3) because it owes nothing of its value to anything the owner does or spends;
"(4) because it is absolutely necessary for existence and production."[25]
Lord Rosebery says, justly, that all these propositions except the last apply to many other forms of property than land, as, for instance, to government bonds, and that it certainly would be Socialism to attempt to confiscate these by taxation.
Lord Rosebery's task would have become even easier later, when Mr. Lloyd George enlarged his attack on the landlords definitely into an attack against the idle upper classes, who with their dependents he reckoned at two million persons. He accused this class of constituting an intolerable burden on the community, said that its existence was the symptom of the disease of society, and that only bold remedies could help. The whole class of inactive capitalists he viewed as a load both on the non-capitalist, wage-earning, salaried and professional classes, and on the active capitalists. Mr. Lloyd George argues with his capitalist supporters that capitalism will be all the stronger when freed from its parasites. But Lord Rosebery could answer that the active could no more be distinguished from the passive capitalists than landowners from bondholders.
An article in the world's leading Socialist newspaper, Vorwaerts, of Berlin, shows that many