The Wisdom of Hilaire Belloc
On The Servile State
One thing that troubles me when reading Belloc’s Servile State is that he may have been right when he asked this question, will people want to own? Belloc argued that owning private property, more particularly land, is the surest bulwark against the servile state. By servile state he meant essentially a form of society where those who are not property owners became enslaved to the wage labor system. But whereas Belloc saw the wage labor economy as a negative thing, he wondered, and rightly so, if the bulk of society, particularly western society, could handle the freedoms and responsibilities that derive from owning private property. Indeed, he questioned if most people even wanted such responsibility.