It is not private ownership, but private ownership divorced from work, which is corrupting to the principle of industry; and the idea of some socialists that private property in land or capital is necessarily mischievous is a piece of scholastic pedantry as absurd as that of those conservatives who would invest all property with some kind of mysterious sanctity.

R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) English writer, economist, historian, social critic [Richard Henry Tawney]

The Acquisitive Century, ch. 5 “The Functional Society” (1920)
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