Yet even if the contemplated state should permit the private ownership of small farms, their owners would be displeased because they would no longer be allowed to hire laborers for working the fields. Some conservative Socialists, indeed, profess willingness to tolerate the employment of one or two farm hands. But not alone do the 1908 National Platform and the amendment adopted by party referendum on September 7, 1909, oppose exploitation, or the employment of hired labor in the production of goods, but innumerable articles in Socialist papers, books and reviews denounce exploitation most emphatically. Hence, if the Socialist state allowed farmers in good standing with the government to own little farms, they could not hire labor to operate them. If the farmer should fall sick, his crops would go to ruin. Advantage could not be taken of some of the great inventions helpful to agriculture, nor scientific methods of work and management. The individual farmer, thus handicapped, might feed himself, his wife, his children, his horse, his cow, his pig, but very little more.
In the Socialist state great discontent would arise from either the toleration or prohibition of small business enterprises. If permitted, without power to hire labor, they must compete with the government. If forbidden, large numbers of persons would be obliged to work for the government, after losing little stores or shops in which for years they had been interested.
In its issue of March 30, 1912, the "Appeal to Reason," then the leading Socialist weekly of the United States, declared that under Socialism John D. Rockefeller would be allowed to retain his money and decide what to do with it. Were this the case, and every person of wealth allowed to retain his money, it is difficult to see how Socialists who hate and detest the rich could endure such a condition, any more than they could tolerate the granting of full or partial indemnity to property owners. The attempt to leave the rich in possession of their wealth would probably incite Socialists to rise in arms against the state they had founded.