Page:Is Capital Income, Earle, 1921.djvu/42

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
42
IS CAPITAL INCOME?

the character and value of the government." Monongahela case, 148 U. S., page 324. So that we are compelled to face the real danger confronting us, and ascertain whether we are to remain a free Republic or bcome a Bolshevist despotism? For, obviously, the real distinction between them lies in the fact that, in the first case what men properly gain from their unalienable pursuit of happiness is theirs. Whilst in the latter it is subject to the control of those who have not created it. That: "Indeed, in a free government, all other rights would become worthless, if the Government possessed an uncontrolled power over the private fortunes of every citizen." Chicago, &c. case, 166 U. S. 235. That: "Life, Liberty, and Property, and the equal protection of the law, grouped together in the Constitution, are so related that the depreciation of any one of these separate and independent rights may lessen or extinguish the value of the other three." Loan Association Case, 20 Wall. 663; Smith vs. Texas, 233 U. S. 636. That: "You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live." Adams Case, 244 U. S. 593.

But such taking, by majority order, is the very heart of the Russian polity; the prohibition of it, that of Free America. So it follows that we now have the inevitable official report that Russia has become a veritable "vacuum of goods." The knowledge that by not enslaving men, we are still, after all our trials, the richest, best supplied nation the world has ever known, to which all other countries are looking for aid, through the kindly principles of freedom, the inevitable results of merely safeguarding men in their enjoyment of what their labors have produced, and consequently and fairly is their own. In other words, that enslaving men is always economic error. But—"By their fruits ye shall know them!"