It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly.

The word capital, as philologists trace it, comes down to us from a time when wealth was estimated in cattle, and a man’s income depended upon the number of head he could keep for their increase.

There is this difference where a man works for himself, or where, when working for an employer, he takes his wages in kind, his wages depend upon the result of his labor. Should that, from any misadventure, prove futile, he gets nothing. When he works for an employer, however, he gets his wages anyhow – they depend upon the performance of the labor, not upon the result of the labor.

All I wish to make clear is that, without any increase in population, the progress of invention constantly tends to give a larger proportion of the produce to the owners of land, and a smaller and smaller proportion to labor and capital.

The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political, and consequently the intellectual and moral condition of a people.

We speak of Liberty as one thing, and of virtue, wealth, knowledge, invention, national strength, and national independence as other things. But, of all these, Liberty is the source, the mother, the necessary condition.

If each laborer in performing the labor really creates the fund from which his wages are drawn, then wages cannot be diminished by the increase of laborers, but, on the contrary, as the efficiency of labor manifestly increases with the number of laborers, the more laborers, other things being equal, the higher should wages be.

The tolerance of wrong dulls our sense of its injustice. Men may become accustomed to theft, murder, even to slavery – that sum of all villainies – so they see no injustice in it, yet that which is unjust is unjust still.

Hitherto, it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. John Stuart Mill.

Capital is but a form of labor, and its distinction from labor is in reality but a subdivision, just as the division of labor into skilled and unskilled would be.