¶ … Fabian social justice on human nature, freedom, and ethics
Man had no problem in the Middle Ages with his money since Free Competition was non-existent. Each man had his class and protection can naturally to them.
It was Capitalism that unmoored all control and regulation from village, guild, central municipality, government and the individual leaving one individual to drown or be drowned by his other more monetarily successful fellow men with no laws in check to stop it. Neither the feudal system nor the guild system could compete with the chaos of the industrial age and the leaps and bounds of capitalist individualism, which seized political reins and ruled the country. The great political economists were ignorant of the suffering of the masses.
Shaw sees Marxism as solution to the problem. More specifically he advocates a form of Social Democracy where the burden of rent will be thrown to the national treasury instead of heaped on the unequal shoulders of individual laborers. This would, accordingly entail that the business themselves (that carry this rent) belong to the national treasury. And, indeed, this is the onus of Socialism.
There are practical difficulties to establishing this system, but these can be overcome when one considers the State to be the trustee and representative of the people. The State, in other words, becomes responsible for the rent of the people and owns the land of the people, so that it can be proportionally distributed and worked out with no suffering brought about on one more than another and with so single individual raising himself at the other's expense.
Shaw sees the passing of laws in recent years, such as the...
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