ABSTRACT
Socialist critics of capitalism maintain that property income received by capital owners under capitalism is “unearned.” Three of the best-known responses to this accusation are that property income is a return to: 1) capital management effort, 2) saving; 3) risk-taking. The validity of these responses is examined in this paper by means of the specification and analysis of models of capital management effort and saving, to which the risk-taking dimension has been added through incorporation of elements of uncertainty. The institutional background for these models is the “pragmatic” variant of market socialism. It is demonstrated that the uncertainty models, no less than their certainty analogues, yield indeterminate results with respect to the validity of these three justifications for property income. It is suggested that the question of whether or not property income is earned may be more “open” and worthy of serious reflection than many economists currently realize.
