Transactions are no longer regulated by free bargaining and discussion, and the mutuality of services disappears.
In this state of things the true notion of Property is extinguished, and everyone appeals to the Law to give his services a factitious value.
We enter then upon the era of privileges. Spoliation, ever improving in subtlety, fortifies herself in Monopoly, and takes refuge behind Restrictions. She displaces the natural current of exchanges, and sends capital into artificial channels, and with capital, labor—and with labor, population. She gets painfully produced in the North what is produced with facility in the South; creates precarious classes and branches of industry; substitutes for the gratuitous forces of nature the onerous fatigues of labor; cherishes establishments that can sustain no rivalry, and invokes against competitors the employment of force; provokes international jealousies; flatters patriotic arrogance; and invents ingenious theories, which make accomplices of her own dupes. She constantly renders imminent industrial crises and bankruptcies, shakes to its foundation all confidence in the future, all faith in liberty, all consciousness of what is just. At length, when science exposes her misdeeds, she stirs up against science her own victims, by proclaiming a Utopia! and ignores not only the science that places obstacles in her path, but the very idea of any possible science, by this crowning sentence of skepticism—There are no principles!
Under the pressure of suffering, at length the masses rise, and overturn everything that is above them. Government, taxes, legislation, everything is at their mercy, and you imagine perhaps that there is now an end to the reign of Spoliation;—that the mutuality of services is about to be established on the only possible, or even imaginable basis—Liberty. Undeceive yourself. The fatal idea, alas! has permeated the masses, that Property has no other origin, no other sanction, no other legitimacy, no other foundation, than Law; and then the masses set to work legislatively to rob one another. Suffering from the wounds that have been inflicted upon them, they undertake to cure each of their members by conceding to him the right to oppress his neighbor, and call this Solidarity and Fraternity. “You have produced—I have not produced—we are solidaires—let us divide.” “You have something—I have nothing—we are brethren—let us share.” It will be our duty then to examine the improper use that has been made in these latter days of the terms association, organization, labor, gratuite du credit [crédito fácil?], etc. We shall have to subject them to this test—Do they imply Liberty or Oppression? In other words, are they in unison with the great Economic laws, or are they distortions of those laws?
Spoliation is a phenomenon too universal, too persistent, to permit us to attribute to it a character purely accidental. In this, as in many other matters, we cannot separate the study of natural laws from the study of their Perturbations. But, it may be said, if spoliation enters necessarily into the play of the social mechanism as a dissonance, how can you venture to assert the Harmony of the Economic laws? I must repeat here what I have said in another place, namely, that in all that concerns man, a being who is only perfectible because he is imperfect, Harmony consists not in the absolute absence of evil, but in its gradual diminution. The social body, like the human body, is provided with a curative force, a vis medicatrix, the laws and infallible power of which it is impossible to study without again exclaiming, Digitus Dei est hic[O dedo de Deus está aqui].
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