Here, however, we shall be met with two important objections. In the
first place, it will no doubt have occurred to many readers that
throughout the foregoing discussion we have assumed that the persons who
receive interest on machinery are in all cases the persons by whom the
machinery was invented and produced. To the actual inventors and
producers it may, indeed, be conceded that the interest which they
themselves receive has been earned by their own exertions; but no such
concession, it will be said, can be made to these men's heirs. An Edison
or a Bessemer may have produced whatever income has come to him in his
latest years from the inventive efforts of his earliest; but if such a
man has a son to whom this income descends--a half-witted degenerate who
squanders it on wine and women, who will not work with his hands and who
cannot work with his head--no one can pretend that, in any sense of the
word, a fool like this produces any fraction of the thousands that he
consumes. And though all of those who live on the interest of inherited
capital are not foolish nor vicious, yet in this respect they are all of
them in the same position--they have not produced their incomes, and so
have no moral right to them.
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