Ran across this comment again after I think like two years? So this is not a reply so much as an opportunity to think out loud, and keep putting pressure on these ideas in my head and see how they shift. In particular, I think the big thing that changed since I wrote the OP and read this reply last time is that I started reading a lot more Henry George, so take that for what it’s worth.
In any case, I think this comment is very on-point in that Colquhoun, above, is absolutely equating 'not being a rentier’ with 'being impoverished’. Likely, I think, because he was only writing at the very beginning of the industrial revolution, and an educated/specialist middle class basically didn’t exist in 1800. But I don’t think you can say the connotations of 'poverty’ have changed all that much; rather, what’s changed is the idea that a laborer could achieve anything other than subsistence, with any real surplus just being extracted by rentiers and capitalists. (That is, by holders of capital, not in the ideological sense.) Remember that this is the same era in which Malthus lived and theorized!
'Labor’ here, as an economic construct, means basically a pile of undifferentiated human flesh that can be flexibly used in the same way that we’d use programmable robots today- plonked in a factory line, given basic instructions, and told to repeat those instructions indefinitely. Capital, in this equation, was the store of value from which this pile of flesh is provided shelter and nutrition- and in fact, per Malthus, this flesh-pile will in fact grow to the capacity set by capital rather than build savings as an individual might. The construct was very 'ecological’ in that way. Charitably, the Flynn effect hadn’t happened yet, so I think it was probably at least marginally easier to think this way without being a cartoon villain.
The difference is, I suppose, one of the great unanticipated triumphs of industrialism- the discovery that humans at all economic strata are in fact persons, both educable and agentic, and that Malthus can in fact go right to hell.
There are a lot of structural forces now in play that genuinely act to preserve the 'non-subsistence labor’ class, some enshrined in law and some encoded in the needs of the modern economy itself. At the same time, I think unskilled labor is still effectively in the same boat as it was in Colquhoun’s day, and the legal and economic advantages enjoyed by skilled labor aren’t strong enough to prevent Walmart shelvers and Amazon warehouse packagers from reverting over time to the most base level of subsistence possible within their host nation’s welfare system and tech level.
This is, of course, where the Georgist nugget kicks in. For all that we may not have the level of ambient wealth needed to support our entire population comfortably on a living-wage UBI, it’s undeniable that as a civilization we’re orders of magnitude more wealthy than previous generations- and by the same token, it’s equally undeniable that a shitty apartment in Portland or New York in 2023 demands a greater store of wealth from its tenants than Colquhoun himself ever laid claim to in his whole damn life. If our average rent today was “the amount of wealth commanded by a day laborer in 1800”, it would be effectively free!
The value of (especially urban) land- not improvements or construction, mind, just the price of an empty lot- grew hand in hand with the wealth and technology we created throughout the industrial revolution, as did the value of other unmodified natural resources like water, precious metals, and even sunlight. And they seem very likely to continue doing so as we fiddle our way through the full symphony of human technological progress; the greater our arts, the more opportunities we’ll see in the world around us. That created value genuinely is collective, as few other things are, and even if a UBI can’t get all the way to a living wage (yet!), then distributing those gains widely would still go a really long way towards allowing unskilled workers to escape subsistence, or (as they prefer) to work far fewer hours in order to achieve it, even if they aren’t educated specialists benefiting directly from employment in O-ring production networks. Monopolization of natural resources really does seem to be a huge contributor to subsistence poverty in technologically modern states.
In other words, my response to “you can’t make everybody a rentier,” is “sure you can! You can literally make 'everybody’ the beneficiary on rents extracted from monopolies on basic natural resources, dividing them equally and impartially among the whole population. And frankly that seems like a great plan, even if it doesn’t end the need for labor as such, because it does so much to alleviate the misery of poverty.”