(b) What is true of land is true of the natural resources of the country-coal, minerals, oil, gas, waterpower, forests.  These were seized, with a small payment or none, by the early comers, and sold later at a great advance, or worked for an increasing profit by the owner.  Here, again, if the nation had maintained an inventory of these values and appropriated to itself all or a percentage of the increase in value (which results from the increasing public need of the resources and the limited supply, together with the increase in facilities for transportation, etc, rather than from the owner’s labor or skill), many of our present gross inequalities in wealth would have been forestalled, and the community would be far richer in its common wealth.  Add to the realization of this fact the sight of the reckless waste by private owners of such resources as can be wasted, and the present conservation movement is fully explained.  The best that can now be done is to retain under government ownership such natural resources as have not yet passed into private hands, and to appropriate further increases in value of those that are privately owned. [Footnote:  C. R. Van Hise, Concentration and Control, pp. 154-66.  Outlook, vol. 85, p. 426; vol. 86, p. 716; vol. 93, p. 770; vol. 95, p. 21.]

(c) Practically all of the upper classes add to the incomes they earn by labor of hands or brain an “unearned” income derived from investment; i.e., from the willingness of others to pay for the use of their accumulated wealth or lands.  A considerable class is thus enabled, if it chooses, to live without working.  A great proportion of this wealth that draws interest was never itself earned by the possessors, in the stricter sense of the word “earned”; it has come to them by inheritance, by the increase of value of land or natural resources, or squeezed out of labor and the public by the unregulated profits of some autocratically managed industry or franchise.  Is it expedient to allow this accumulated wealth to bring an income to its possessors?  There are two possibilities:  one goes with government control of private industry, the other with industrial socialism.

According to the first plan, income might still be derived from money in savings banks, from stocks and bonds, and from the rent of land and buildings.  But it would cease to be a serious source of inequality.  For if the unearned increment of land values and natural resources were deflected to the State, if none but moderate profits were allowed from industry; and if, in addition, the right of inheritance and gift were sharply curtailed, there would be, after a generation, no large fortunes left or thereafter possible.  A man might receive by legacy a moderate amount of money, a little land or property; by working efficiently and living simply he might add continually to his investments and so come to have an income measurably beyond his earnings.  But he could not get wealth enough for investment to be freed in perpetuity from the necessity of earning his living; and inequalities of wealth could not become very great; no greater, perhaps, than would be consistent with the greatest happiness.