Topic
The oldest idea here is Ovid's: birth, ancestry, what we have not ourselves achieved — we can scarcely call our own. This opens a collection that is persistently suspicious of inherited wealth and accumulated possessions. Nobel, who accumulated and then disbursed an enormous fortune, calls contentment the only real wealth. Franklin's investment-in-knowledge aphorism is the most democratic item — it points toward a form of property that cannot be taken. Bagehot's defense of self-interest as the engine of capital appears without apology, giving the collection its ideological tension. Calvin and Murray bring the theological dimension: property is a stewardship question, not an ownership question. Rousseau poses it as a philosophical limit: if one owned the entire universe and were its only survivor, what good would it be? Bierce's sardonic note about death and the litigation over the estate cuts the pretension from both sides of the argument. Property, this collection suggests, is most honestly understood as something we are responsible for rather than something we possess.
Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.
Few rich men own their property. The property owns them.