ABSTRACT
Karl Marx, the founder of materialistic socialism, is recognized by economists as one of the three or four greatest minds who have contributed to the progress of economic science. David Ricardo had taken for granted the institution of private property, but Marx resolved property into exploitation of wage-earners through the power of the State, which, it was believed, created the rights of property. Ricardo’s theory did, in fact, leave the wage-earner in the position of a commodity or machine, from whose labor the capitalist derived his profits and interest. He looked upon the capitalists’ profits as the moving force of industry, and upon high wages as the cause of low profits, and therefore the cause of stagnation of business and unemployment. The self-recovery of capitalism began with the general incorporation laws of the decade of the 1850s. Prior to that decade, in America and Europe, a corporate charter could be obtained only by a special act of the legislature.
