John Augustine Ryan (1869–1945)

Distributive justice is primarily a problem of incomes rather than of possessions. It is not immediately concerned with John Brown's railway stock, John White's house, or John Smith's automobile. It deals with the morality of such possessions only indirectly and under one aspect; that is, in so far as they have been acquired through income. Moreover, it deals only with those incomes that are derived from participation in the process of production. For example; it considers the labourer's wages, but not the subsidies that he may receive through charity or friendship. Its province is not the distribution of all the goods of the country among all the people of the country, but only the distribution of the products of industry among the classes that have taken part in the making of these products.

These classes are four, designated as landowners, capitalists, undertakers or business men, and labourers or wage earners. The individual member of each class is an agent of production, while the instrument or energy that he owns and contributes is a factor of production. Thus, the landowner is an agent of production because he contributes to the productive process the factor known as land, and the capitalist is an agent of production because he contributes the factor known as capital; while the business man and the labourer are agents not only in the sense that they contribute factors to the process, but in the very special sense that their contributions involve the continuous expenditure of human energy. Now the product of industry is [xiv] distributed among these four classes precisely because they are agents of production; that is because they own and put at the disposal of industry the indispensable factors of production. We say that the agents of production "put the factors of production at the disposal of industry," rather than "exercise or operate the factors," because neither the landowner nor the capitalist, as such, expend continuous energy in the productive process. All that is necessary to enforce a claim upon the product is to contribute an instrument or factor without which production cannot be carried on.… (más)