Thorstein Veblen - Ownership Quotes

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Invested wealth in large holdings controls the country's industrial system, directly by ownership of the plant, as in the mechanical industries, or indirectly through the market, as in farming. So that the population of these civilized countries now falls into two main classes: those who own wealth invested in large holdings and who thereby control the conditions of life for the rest; and those who do not own wealth in sufficiently large holdings, and whose conditions of life are therefore controlled by these others. It is a division, not between those who have something and those who have nothing — as many socialists would be inclined to describe it — but between those who own wealth enough to make it count, and those who do not.

Thorstein Veblen
From the ownership of women the concept of ownership extends itself to include the products of their industry, and so there arises the ownership of things as well as of persons.

Thorstein Veblen
And all the while the owner of the equipment is some person who has contributed no more than his per-capita quota to this state of the industrial arts out of which his earnings arise. Indeed the chances are that the owner has contributed less than his per-capita quota, if anything, to that common fund of knowledge on the product of which he draws by virtue of his ownership, because he is likely to be fully occupied with other things, — such things as lucrative business transactions, e. g., or the decent consumption of superfluities.

Thorstein Veblen
There is a great and pressing need of such a construction of these principles, which would greatly facilitate the work of corporation finance; but it is to be admitted that some slight cloud still rests on this manner of disposing of ownership. It involves abdication or delegation of that discretionary exercise of property rights which has been held to be of the essence of ownership.

Thorstein Veblen
It may well be that the frame of mind engendered by this training in matter-of-fact ways of thinking will presently so shape popular sentiment that all income from property, simply on the basis of ownership, will be disallowed, whether the property is tangible or intangible. All that is a speculative question running into the future.

Thorstein Veblen
That such has been the practical outcome is due to the fact that these enlightened principles of the eighteenth century comprise as their chief article the "natural" right of ownership. The later course of events has decided that the ownership of property in sufficiently large blocks will control the country's industrial system and thereby take over the disposal of the community's net output of product over cost; on which the vested interests live and on which, therefore, the kept classes feed. Hence the chief concern of those gentlemanly national governments that have displaced the dynastic states is always and consistently the maintenance of the rights of ownership and investment.

Thorstein Veblen