IV. The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life In the Present and the Future

Not equal are men in regard to their individual abilities and talents. All these individual abilities and talents must be developed in a free intellectual life, in an intellectual life independent of the State. Democracy can achieve nothing here. Democracy has as its content everything in which all men are equal and to which no experience of life belongs. But experience of life is the element of economic life. The State must not concern itself with economic affairs. Its function is to lay down and regulate all those matters in which one human being is absolutely equal to another, and in which true democracy can prevail. These include, besides property rights, which you will find more fully explained in my book, above all labor law. In the future, the time, extent and type of work will have to be regulated by the state, which is independent of economic life, so that the worker, who is himself involved in this regulation, comes with a legally limited amount of work, with a working hours limited above all by labor law, when he enters the factory or workshop, before he concludes any kind of contract with a supervisor. Just as economic life, on the one hand, borders on the natural foundations of life and can only get by with a few technical measures, but is ultimately dependent on them, so economic life will, in the future, have to border on the other side of the firmly established labor law. It will no longer be possible to determine wages according to the utility value of goods, as is still essentially the case in our economic system today. All prosperity, all production within economic life will only be able to be shaped as a consequence of what is determined by the state as labor law, just as economic life can only be developed as dependent on natural resources. You can read more about this in my book “The Key Aspects of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life Today and in the Future”. We are now coming to the second of the key aspects of the social question, the regulation of labor law by separating economic life from state life.