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65

(1918) [MARC] Author: Alfons Heyking - Tema: Russia
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BOLSHEVIK POLITICAL ECONOMY 65

not by muscular force, but by his intelligence in directing
and counselling his fellow-men, and creating values of a
higher economic or moral order, does work of a superior
kind which should be acknowledged as such. Conscious of
that fact such men possessing higher education, higher
culture, naturally expect a correspondingly higher standard
of living. It stands to reason that occupation in the more
elevated atmosphere of science, theoretical and applied,
literature, art, statesmanship, and so forth, generates other
requirements of life than the healthier but simpler and
more rudimentary mode of living of the man who uses
muscular force alone. Hence the necessity of admitting
and recognising that the reward for work done by brain
or by physical labour should abide by different standards.
Equality in this respect would be neither just nor
economically possible.

Social revolutionaries aim at the suppression of personal
responsibility and enterprise in favour of collectivism
overruling the individual in politics, economics, and finance.
Its policy is for the benefit of the mediocre, lazy, improvident,
inefficient—in a word, for those who through lack of
qualifications or the vagaries of Fate lag behind in the struggle for
life, and its intention is to curb the endeavour of those
possessing better qualifications for success or being more
favoured by fortune. But a distribution of wealth, outside
personal merit, stands in flagrant contradiction to the
principles of equity and justice. There should certainly be
equality in chances and opportunities as far as possible,
but never and nowhere can a forcible interference in the
distribution of wealth be obtained without doing an injury
to one of the chief promoters of the production of wealth,
i.e. personal merit.

Leaving out of account the element of luck which, though
playing a conspicuous part in human affairs, of course
lies outside the scope of investigation, the origin of wealth
may be traced in industry, talent, energy, enterprise, and
thrift. If, therefore, inequality in the possession of wealth
is the postulate in the difference in the economic potential^

E

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