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. . . Possibly the principal objection to a plan of individual maximums affecting property ownership or yearly returns of income from all occupations (profits, shares, dividends, wages—call them what you will) and for any individual compensation received for any service to society—to all this the usual and first objection will be that such a plan is (a) an unnatural, arbitrary, rigid and inelastic process, and hence (b) that it will stifle, at least retard, personal initiative, enterprise, enthusiasm, and even genius. If there can be found in natural history, inanimate or animate, any law that indicates that nature favors permanent congestion—that the largest part of the land is sterile, and a very small part fertile—that a few stomachs only need most of the food supply—that a few stomachs only can digest a regular dinner—then there may be found in the system of property congestion an analogy with the way nature works, and if so the objection (a) will be more convincing. Again, as to (b), the germ of human creative endeavor has its birth in a place nearer to the soul and inner consciousness than to any external stimulant. No genius ever stopped creating because he knew he never could make a million dollars. No genius was ever a pure pragmatist. If a pathologist will quit his laboratory because he knows that he can’t own more property than will furnish his family with reasonable present and future needs, it is certain that if he should continue his research for a thousand years he would never run down the tubercular bacilli. Society would lose nothing by the loss of his labor. A man who will not work because he cannot share in an eventual monopoly furnishes prima facie evidence that he is not a part of the “survival of the fittest.” Nature will always furnish a normal number of those individuals who will render better service for reasonable and natural returns than the above minority species.

What is the difference between an art inspiration and a business inspiration? Is it a difference of quality or reward only? Reward has to play an important part in a business effort, and by nature the reward has to be material in quality, to a great extent. But the reward in an art effort has little to do with its cause, and therefore the less material it is, the more natural the effort. The difference is then, it seems, a matter between quality with little or no reward and quality with strongly related reward. If Edison had known in advance that he could be worth in property no more than Beethoven, would he have stopped inventing any more than Beethoven would have stopped composing? If there is any fear that as soon as a man obtains his maximum he will start in loafing, it would be an easy matter to enforce a constitutional provision requiring every citizen (at least until he reaches a certain age) to certify to a certain amount of daily work, whether it be hoeing corn or painting landscapes. For our own part, we hope some day to obtain our maximum and retire to business on ten acres and dig potatoes and write symphonies. Ninety-eight men out of a hundred who have been industrious enough to reach their maximum will find no pleasure in doing nothing, unless senility or bad health opposes them. At the inception of a future maximum plan there might be some despondency, and there might be some falling off in initiative, but things would eventually respond normally. . . .

Charles Ives