earth like a perpetually undulating ocean as long as world history goes on, and under these circumstances the people who fulfill their God-given destiny are those who strive to reconcile and unite authority and freedom, at first in their own lives, and then in the position that God has given them on the outside. These fundamental circumstances are reflected in all other human circumstances, and they also cast their light and shadow onto the questions we are dealing with here. Compulsory guild membership is a restriction on freedom, occupational freedom, so in a certain sense it represents the very kind of authority that is intended to prevent and eliminate the abuse of freedom. The idea behind compulsory guilds was to protect workers, a kind of contract between the working class and the rest of society. According to this contract, the working class provided [society] the necessary work, but society, by restricting competition, provided the workers a higher wage in order to secure their livelihood and not subject it to daily fluctuations. Whoever delivered labor to somebody else and had to stake his life on that – he had a moral right to a certain degree of security with respect to his ongoing livelihood and to the protection of not having to put his livelihood into question every day through competition. By way of natural and artificial barriers, all social classes have some kind of protection similar to this. Why should the worker alone do without it? Why should the worker alone have to spend his entire life thinking about his work on a daily basis: I still don’t know if today is the day I will get my wages, from which I and my wife and children live; maybe tomorrow a horde of hungry workers from a distant region will arrive and bid my work away from me, and I will be forced to starve with wife and child. The wealthy capitalist has enough capital to protect his business a thousand times over; freedom of trade in these regions is only a one-sided illusion. But the worker shouldn’t be allowed to have any protection, and this is why guild occupations are slandered. This doesn’t mean that compulsory guilds have been flawless. That authority has been abused does not have to imply that authority itself must be rejected. Thus, even compulsory guild membership, because it has not enjoyed the proper development, has been abused to a great extent. It has often served inertia and egoism, made goods excessively expensive, and deprived consumers of their rights through shoddy goods; hence it needed reshaping. But its principle was legitimate and needed to be maintained. Compulsory guild membership has the same relationship vis-à-vis occupational freedom as authority vis-à-vis freedom. It, too, has its measure of legitimacy, but also its legitimate measure of restriction. Compulsory guilds in their current state of abuse and ossified egoism have elicited the call for occupational freedom. Occupational freedom has immeasurably increased the [number of] commodities, improving them in many cases; it has lowered the excessive price of commodities, and has therefore allowed the widest circle of those classes with fewer means to experience the satisfaction of some of life's basic necessities, from which they had previously been excluded. But it, too, has its necessary limit and its established degree, and when these are exceeded, it leads to unfortunate consequences just like the abuse of compulsory guild membership.
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