The Requirements of a Policy of Wage Settlement

would show to be untrue your statement that sum total of money incomes received during a given period is exchanged against the sum total of goods produced and personal services rendered. People live as well as they can, but there is still an unconsumed increment and that is absorbed in land values. Build a subway or a sewer, a railroad or a factory, the eventual result is the same-a larger productivity and a larger return to the lord of the land. It is no answer to say that one owner sold to another, and the new owner paid the bigger price. The old owner collected his unearned increment, and the new owner charges the price on his investment account and gets a return on it. Maybe he also sells and the process is repeated. If he does not sell, he charges the increased value and gets the return himself. All the while, the more we increase in numbers and productivity, the more we dump into the bottomless pit known as economic rent. Before the employer as such and his workers have anything to divide, they must pay the non-productive landowner for the privilege of producing. The more he gets, the less there is for them to divide on any basis. I am painfully aware that I have not said anything in all this discussion that definitely assists in the solution of the particular problem you present. The subject involves psychological as well as other factors: status as well as cost of living. For the moment, and until great changes are made, both in the mechanism of industrial society and the psychology of the human beings involved, I can see no better way of adjustment than the way in which it is accomplished nowby agreement between groups if possible, and by fighting for it when we must; voting for it when we have sense enough to abolish the underlying causes of dissatisfaction. If the results of your relative rating and the union scale coincide closely, there will not be any trouble at that moment. If you let us in on the making of it, it will lubricate the process. But my conclusion is that no purely mechanical scheme can have any but a limited success, according to surrounding circumstances, and, under some circumstances, no success at all. s, the les there is for them to divide

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