owners from the common human necessity of labor make inequality an
institution permeating every corner of society, from the distribution
of material wealth to the training of intellect itself. Do they desire
greater industrial efficiency? There is no more fatal obstacle to
efficiency than the revelation that idleness has the same privileges as
industry, and that for every additional blow with the pick or hammer an
additional profit will be distributed among shareholders who wield
neither.

Indeed, functionless property is the greatest enemy of legitimate
property itself. It is the parasite which kills the organism that
produced it. Bad money drives out good, and, as the history of the
last two hundred years shows, when property for acquisition or power
and property for service or for use jostle each other freely in the
market, without restrictions such as some legal systems have imposed on
alienation and inheritance, the latter tends normally to be absorbed by
the former, because it has less resisting power. Thus functionless
property grows, and as it grows it undermines the creative energy which
produced property and which in earlier ages it protected. It cannot
unite men, for what unites them is the bond of service to a common
purpose, and that bond it repudiates, since its very {82} essence is
the maintenance of rights irrespective of service. It cannot create;
it can only spend, so that the number of scientists, inventors, artists
or men of letters who have sprung in the course of the last century
from hereditary riches can be numbered on one hand. It values neither
culture nor beauty, but only the power which belongs to wealth and the
ostentation which is the symbol of it.

So those who dread these qualities, energy and thought and the creative
spirit--and they are many--will not discriminate, as we have tried to
discriminate, between different types and kinds of property, in order
that they may preserve those which are legitimate and abolish those
which are not. They will endeavor to preserve all private property,
even in its most degenerate forms. And those who value those things
will try to promote them by relieving property of its perversions, and
thus enabling it to return to its true nature. They will not desire to
establish any visionary communism, for they will realize that the free
disposal of a sufficiency of personal possessions is the condition of a
healthy and self-respecting life, and will