He didn't have that option if his Wikipaedia biography is to be believed
What if "share your wealth" was applied?
- Thread starter Gukpard
- Start date
The means justifying the ends is a slippery slope.
I know about the arguments. But I also believe in the right to private property. I don't expect you to agree, but my opinion is that the Share Your Wealth Movement is taking wealth redistribution to an extreme level.
The experience of the former Soviet Union would tend to argue against this thesis. You wouldn't get sudden radical impoverishment but would get an economy that was less nimble, more risk averse and less creative. I don't love the very rich -horrible shits most of them- but they have two very important social functions based on their surplus capital. As the source of investment capital for new technologies and techniques and as early adopters of new goods and services before their provision is streamlined enough for the ordinary man in the street to be able to afford them.
It could be a lot more extreme though. Suppose, ASB though it may be, Long accomplishes this politically, and long before 1940, by 1937 let us say. None of the rich affected by the 8 million dollar cap leave or take extraordinary measures to sabotage the system. How terribly hurt are they? They have personal wealth worth nearly 150 million dollars in modern terms. We might well guess that they would all resign from effective participation in wealth management, retiring to their homes to spend their wealth down. How much could they reasonably spend in a lifetime? And doing so they create a stable pool of demand despite any market fluctuations, which stabilizes productive enterprise to an extent. As each one bleeds off money they can get back into the game of investment for profit, until the net proceeds restores them back to the cap level, then selling off their profitable assets, withdraw again.
Meanwhile the huge lump sum of value, which after all represents concrete, material assets, has ownership widely distributed. This enables huge masses of investors to get into the market replacing the relative few who dominated it before. According to classical economic theory, this ought to both invigorate and stabilize the investment market which supplies working firms with operating capital. If it is true that opportunity exists in the market for small investors, people with working-class incomes in fact, to profit by the market, these are the circumstances in which this is most likely to be true.
Thus, overall political support for the general idea of private wealth is consolidated rather than eroded. It's a very conservative scheme really.
And that is why I think it is unworkable, in the ultra-simple form offered. How do we know how much wealth there is, and who has it? I'd think it would be necessary to take such steps as nationalizing all banks and consolidating them into one central Federal bank, owned nominally by the people of the USA collectively. I'd also suggest similarly nationalizing the stock business and securities generally, make stock a matter of owning a defined share of the assessed value of a firm, quarter to quarter. Untangle all the complicated webs of ownership to boil them down to individual personal shares of defined material assets. Eliminate the insurance industry and adopt a uniform system of payouts for specified losses, contingent on well-defined due diligence to avoid hazard, paid for out of taxes. Eliminate the system of ownership of patents, and substitute a system of rewards for coming forth and publishing inventions, where an expert national board evaluates the likely economic benefits, and pays the inventor an initially conservative bounty for submitting it to public use. Then, using the sort of data gathered for tax assessment purposes and other basic legal machinery of the state protecting the value of property, as well as evaluating new inventions for their extensions of prior published arts, issue supplementary bounties to the inventors for real, demonstrated value added to the general economy, again all paid for out of general tax assessments. Thus an inventor would be unable to control or limit the application of their invention; anyone in the nation is free to exploit it immediately--but the more it is used, the more payments the inventor gets.
Quite a lot of socialism would be needed to make this workable--but this socialism is in service of making profitable firms that produce useful items more viable and stable, easier to start and able to make profits on a smaller scale, as well as guaranteeing a minimum standard of living for all. And like the stability that the discouraged rich spending down their fortunes provides, so would the minimum guaranteed income of the masses stabilize the markets from below. Thus perhaps the regular upswings and downswings of the market might be naturally limited, leaving the various strategies of investors and innovators to focus on success in a more predictable market rather than juggling the boom and bust cycle; presumably profit schemes focused in real growth at a steady rate would tend to both accelerate and stabilize that steady rate.
Without some kind of intervention in the public interest, free market systems are subject to various maladies that tend to fall hardest on the poor majority, and get worse with time. This is essentially what is happening to the global labor market now. One either takes the side of wealth having a primary claim on the productive power of the world's workforces without any meaningful responsibility for the outcomes for these workers, or accepts that some form of redistributive transfer downward is necessary for the public good. And strange as it may seem, it is also better for the best-off in the long run because it can stabilize the system.
The system I've described bears very little resemblance to the Stalinist top-down command economy. Of course to make it practically workable we'd have to take all sorts of extra measures that the OP did not specify I suppose. But all of these can be handled very differently than the Bolsheviks desired. There are no Ministries of various industries commanding specified outputs from specified inputs and taking all decision making away from the individual firms here. Here we have a mix of private and worker investors sharing ownership of the firm, with no state intervention (beyond skimming all individual assets beyond 1935 $ 8 million) dictating anything. Thus the dynamics of the Soviet Plan system and this have little to do with each other.
But why should that be? What we might have instead is tens of millions of investors, who have a lot less than $8 million, seeking to multiply the value of their capital considerably below that limit. This puts up money for lots of competition. Firms that are less nimble, more risk averse and less creative will still be crowded out by others that are more aggressive. The fact that seeing an individual limit that successful investors approach removes the most successful from the pool may result in a degradation of collective wisdom, but the fact is OTL market players who have been in the business all their lives wind up collectively doing very stupid things; I think any falling out of experienced players leaving the market run by neophyte amateurs would have any bad effects of that more than offset by the sandwiching stabilization of the pool of idle rich trickling wealth down from above, and the pool of guaranteed minimum income sustaining markets from below.
Again this is not a Soviet command economy. It might be something like syndicalism, which I have not studied very closely. It isn't Marxist in doctrine, in that there is no desire to eliminate the dynamism of individual wealth accumulation, merely to cap it at levels far above anything the pool of the working class can reasonably expect to attain.
Some criticism mentioned that perhaps the $8 million cap will not be raised with inflation. Still, how many of us on this board could possibly hope to end our lives with $8 million, 2017 dollars, in assets? Raising the cap with inflation is probably a good idea and would probably get democratic approval, but even if not, little harm would be done.
They aren't the source of investment capital. The source of investment capital is producing goods at lower cost than their value, measured as the socially necessary labor time to put another increment of a given commodity on the market. They manage the investment capital. The workers doing their jobs are the source of investment capital, along with being the source of the goods and services socially necessary to consume.
In the form of STW I laid out above, what happens is that the largest holders remove themselves from the system, except as passive consumers, but other people who have not yet managed to come within close range of the asset ceiling remain motivated to seek opportunities to profit from new technologies and new techniques. New goods and services are going to fall into the categories of capital goods--that is, items or services that relate to the productive process, and the hungry legions of small investors will batten onto those, probably earlier and with more aggression than the very comfortable and powerful centralized gigantic capitals of OTL do. And consumer goods and services, which people with wealth in the ballpark of over $100 million will be well fixed to purchase for their own gratification.
Workers you see continue to be exploited. But they accept this, because realistically the high productivity of modern industrial techniques does require both centralized management and a rather ruthless drive to keep costs, including labor costs, in check.
In a sense--in the sense any laissez-faire system will lead to massive social injustice and discontent--the welfare of the working class is in contradiction to the demands of the system. Capitalism can operate on the backs of a deeply miserable working class, with the effective market demand mostly coming from the gratification of the rich minority, and with the net cost of maintaining the workforce being a minor line item in the whole.
Don't forget--Wehrner von Braun operated Camp Dora to make V-2 rockets, some of the most advanced weaponry then extant on the face of the planet, requiring not only dumb labor but skills such as draftsmen had to provide, with a workforce they didn't even feed. This is admittedly unsustainably low, but it doesn't have to be much more generous to be sustainable. That is, if we omit the matter of politics and the weapons workers have in the class struggle.
Vice versa though, workers have definitely not shown the all-conquering capability to brush aside the bourgeois classes and simply run everything on their own behalf for motives of pure communist solidarity either. In my perception the biggest blind spot and area of failing Marxists have shown is in the field of politics. On analyzing and predicting the operations of competitive capitalism they have been spot-on with a far better track record than the so-called economists of mainstream academia. On predicting, let alone mobilizing, the political behavior of proletarian masses, including their actual response to a Party run socialist order, they have fallen quite flat on their faces.
STW is a muddled compromise which remains fundamentally capitalist in its operations and assumes capitalist motives continue to drive the working class too. The working class majority supports it because their worst (and entirely legitimate, under our current system) fears are addressed, the carrot of becoming one of the idle rich via the path of honorable workplace accomplishment remains fixed before them. It is only if one believes the stick of absolute poverty that is the lot alike of bad workers who don't fit in or step out of line, and perfectly good ones who just happen to be surplus to the new technologies and new techniques is also vital that capitalism cannot afford this sort of paternalistic social welfare.
Will the poor in fact also sit idle, refusing to show up and work in factories they might well own a share in, because a minimal income is guaranteed to them? To an extent, this merely adjusts the size of the workforce to come in line with the higher levels of productivity available. But I think the lure of having more via wages, and even eventually having enough independent wealth to sit it out in style, would be adequate to keep the wheels turning, and the funds for investment that used to come down like manna from a capricious and greedy pantheon of the super-wealthy will now well up from below.
Dismissing an ends justify the means approach in politics as a slippery slope is, in my opinion, a nonsensical platitude. All politics is concerned with achieving ends of some sort, and all agents involved are seeking to achieve those ends through various means.
One could just as easily turn your support for property rights on its head and argue that the means necessary to defend property rights are a slippery slope to all manner great evils, whether those be the maladies that arise from the concentration of wealth and power that follow from private ownership of capital, to the hypothetical support for a dictatorial regime to protect private ownership from democratic governments without the same reverence for private property.
The problem is that the more successful I become $6 -7.5 million say, the more risk averse I become. Starting any kind of new business or developing a new line is a gamble and the incentive is that, over time, I will be much better off -25%, 50%, 500% than I am now against the risk that I could be 100% worse off if my investment tanks. Now, if I already have $6million, I can only ever be 33% better off, if I already have $7.5 million, I can only ever be about 6% better off. So the risks are going to heavily outweigh the gains. And you need some capital to start a business.
When I say that the rich are the source of investment capital I am not talking about who does the work of creating the goods (and material costs and machinery investment are also factors BTW) - I mean that the rich are the only people who have accumulated enough wealth to be willing to risk it on unproven technologies or unprecedented investments. If 100,000 people have $1 of surplus capital they will mainly buy themselves an extra piece of pie rather than save it towards buying a share in IBM (or an automobile or a record player). If one man has $100,000 of surplus capital he will buy himself a car, a refrigerator and one of those new fangled TV sets and some shares that look like they might increase in value. If I have a lot of money I can afford to risk some. If only a little, the risk likely outweighs the potential reward.
As William Gibson said "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed" Crucial role of the rich -early adopters. Carpets, wallpaper, curtains, cars, radios, gramophones, freezers, home computers, mobile phones -All started out as toys of the idle rich an ordinary man couldn't afford.
Camp Dora is a very extreme example and even there, you have to factor in the costs of the SS security apparatus that prevented the workforce from fleeing or revolting. I suspect that competent economic analysis would show that it was either cheaper or cost neutral to pay the workers a reasonable wage.
there's a lot of argument and theory being tossed around here. My question would be... has any nation anywhere tried to do this? Do we have any real world examples to look at? If not, then theorizing about it is all we can do...
With regards to the lack of investment sources, I think it's worth bearing in mind that individual private investors seeking profit aren't the only source of investment.
I can easily see Huey Long, and the other bourgeois radicals and soft-socialists his politics would have resonated with, supporting the establishment of state-owned investment banks owned and operated by the government, at both the federal, state, and municipal levels, that would offer low interest loans and grants to assist economic development, with the management subject to democratic oversight.
Another source could be through the development of non-profit organisations and foundations, committed to promoting particular social and economic ends, such as encouraging the arts, promoting particular technologies, providing various services to a community, etc. (also because it's still 1930s America you would probably have some shit causes as well like supporting whites only businesses and segregation). Given enough time you might see the development of a culture of civic duty, similar to Ancient Rome or the Renaissance City States, where wealthy citizens feel obligated to, and are celebrated for, providing for worthy causes. I mean, it's not as though the super wealthy are adverse to displays of philanthropy IOTL, and when you have a maximum wealth cap there will probably be those with a sense that "well this $8 million is my personal money to enjoy as I see fit, but given that anything I make beyond that will be taxed away anyway I might as well put it towards a worthy cause that I agree with rather than what some pencil pusher in Washington thinks is right".
Obviously, both institutions would create plenty of opportunities for fraud and corruption, but that doesn't prevent them functioning as sources of investment.
I can easily see Huey Long, and the other bourgeois radicals and soft-socialists his politics would have resonated with, supporting the establishment of state-owned investment banks owned and operated by the government, at both the federal, state, and municipal levels, that would offer low interest loans and grants to assist economic development, with the management subject to democratic oversight.
Another source could be through the development of non-profit organisations and foundations, committed to promoting particular social and economic ends, such as encouraging the arts, promoting particular technologies, providing various services to a community, etc. (also because it's still 1930s America you would probably have some shit causes as well like supporting whites only businesses and segregation). Given enough time you might see the development of a culture of civic duty, similar to Ancient Rome or the Renaissance City States, where wealthy citizens feel obligated to, and are celebrated for, providing for worthy causes. I mean, it's not as though the super wealthy are adverse to displays of philanthropy IOTL, and when you have a maximum wealth cap there will probably be those with a sense that "well this $8 million is my personal money to enjoy as I see fit, but given that anything I make beyond that will be taxed away anyway I might as well put it towards a worthy cause that I agree with rather than what some pencil pusher in Washington thinks is right".
Obviously, both institutions would create plenty of opportunities for fraud and corruption, but that doesn't prevent them functioning as sources of investment.
One thing state directed finance might do is assist small investors with pooling their investments for effective control of the enterprises they work in, introducing some syndicalism into the mix.
Also note that the 8 million dollar cap, while authentically what Long proposed, is a very simplistic system and coming to real power he might agree to a more flexible one. Say the Income Tax is replaced (via Amendment) with a Wealth tax, with an exemption of $3 million, and after that is levied marginally on average annual wealth at a rate of 1 percent per million, so that a person holding $103 million would owe the integral from zero to 100 percent on 100 million, which is to say 50 percent of that or $50 million. To maintain that level of wealth, the return on investment of the entire $103 million in one year would have to be $50 million, or 48.54%--I don't think there can be such an accomplished Captain of Industry in the annals of entrepreneurship, barring overtly criminal acts!
But suppose the average investor can one way or another reliably realize 5 percent interest. If we plot net earnings, that is annual wealth divided by 20 and then minus the progressive wealth tax above, the income curve peaks at $275,000 net when net computed worth is 8 million--that is, after the wealth tax. With no tax at all, it would be 400,000, so considered as an income tax it is 31.25 percent. But note that $8 million is hardly the peak; as wealth grows beyond that point, the take-home amount does decline, but remains positive until we reach levels of assets of $15.4 million--at which point Uncle Sam is taking the entire return on investment, or around $750,000. Note that if a person with an alternate source of income in which to live who therefore did not touch their investment started with $ 8 million in this system, over the course of some 25 years their net wealth would rise to nearly double, and then stabilize there, at nearly twice the cap Long proposed. And if that person were to suddenly start drawing from that stock, they'd have to deplete nearly half of it before they reached peak income at $8 million.
Now if a particularly sharp business person were able to consistently realize not 5 but ten percent, they would have peak income of $800,000 when their assets rose to $13 million, and would still be accruing more money than they are taxed when their assets have risen to well over $25.5 million.
So with a graduated wealth tax of this nature, it is possible for superior enterprise to accumulate considerably greater wealth despite the tax. This system is far more severe on the rich than any Western country's OTL tax system, yet clearly considerably more indulgent that a flat ceiling of S8 million. Under such a system, truly tremendous accumulations of wealth are impossible, but a great many individuals can enjoy holdings and incomes far above the average. The disincentive to continue investing, insofar as that is crucial, accumulates only gradually above the $3 million exemption. It might be remarked that incomes beyond the peak plummet to levels no higher than someone who achieves $3 million and holds it there without ever paying any tax, but the individuals matching this income on the high end own a lot more wealth than the untaxed richest do, some 7 times as much in the case with the 10 percent return on investment, or 4 times as much with a 5 percent return. Even at a lousy 1 percent return on investment income maximizes--at a lousy $35,000 per year which is chump change today but in 1935 dollars well over 10 times average annual incomes even in good business years--when assets are $4 million, and remain higher than the 3 million dollar breakpoint income at $5 million--it is impossible for it to rise to $ 8 million--for that goal, one must earn at least a 1.6 percent return, and will not be making any money to speak of. You have to push it up to 2.5 to make $ 8 million in assets equal the return from 3 million dollars not taxed.
Such a system will not capture as much from a given national income and wealth distribution as Long's would. But it sharply limits the size of maximum fortunes while leaving incentives to push for more income largely intact until wealth rises to levels in the ballpark of $ 8 million.
Remember that for people who have raised their wealth into these brackets to enjoy their earnings with as little siphoned off via Uncle Sam as possible, they must spend it as fast as it comes in. This accelerates the rate of "trickle down" considerably. Meanwhile investors who have not yet accumulated $3 million 1935 dollars have every incentive to stay in the game, and the sort of government revenues these wealth taxes imply seem quite ample for the Federal government to fund a wide variety of approaches to investment upkeep simultaneously--to manage the paperwork for small worker-investors, to provide matching funds and guarantees, to fund infrastructure and other Keynesian investments such as military munitions, research and development and so forth.
I make no mistake--the rich will absolutely hate this system. They would denounce it as the work of the devil and the end of civilization, and vow their lives to bringing it down. Vice versa, if we figure that the machinery of industry will not grind to a halt nor stagnate for generations, but grow at rates at least comparable to OTL less regulated capitalism, then the workers have won a great victory for them to defend, even if it remains true that a relative few skim off much greater fortunes than they enjoy from their labor--under this system it is much clearer how that concentration of wealth does provide directly for employment they need, and does guarantee their essential needs and fund many tangible benefits. As a victory for the working classes, they can be expected to defend it.
And where would fleeing capitalists go, in the 1930s? The entire world system had come down, opportunity was scarce anywhere. Insofar as Britain and France had managed to stabilize their fall, it was via manipulating the status of colonial holdings, and these are clearly a zero sum game relative to a horde of angry and frightened Americans whose mismanagement was the proximate cause of the global crash anyway. What kind of a welcome can they expect in either colonial/imperial system? Rather, if the poor and middling majority of Americans who stayed at home have any sort of success with their capped and wealth-transferring system, the metropolitan masses in France and Britain might start wondering if they can't do the same sort of thing themselves. This gives the old world empires some incentive to join with expatriate American former rich in a crusade, I suppose, but it also means that if the Share the Wealth system works, the American people have great potential to fight for their victory. They enjoy numbers as well as the industrial capacity to produce plenty of state of the art munitions, and a financial system that can leverage the funds to pay for them quickly too. European elites would be in a hell of a position trying to motivate smaller numbers of drafted Tommies or polous to fight for their sacred right to be poor and lorded over by people with wealth a thousand times their own, when these gentlemen had just mismanaged the whole global economy. They could of course try drafting larger numbers of colonial troops, whose peoples are even poorer than the European masses and even more blatantly exploited; that is sure to end well.
I have no doubt that anyone who tries this in the real world will have no easy path; the damage that the sectors of the population who stand to lose would do would be tremendous, and indeed the moral right of the majority to act in this way will be called into question to say the least.
But in terms of technical feasibility once established, I think that if one takes an honest look at the liabilities of the OTL global capitalist system as it has evolved, it is actually superior for both rich and poor countries, offering superior sustained rates of development for all with maximum political integration, while retaining the advantages of a laissez-faire economy and the morality that goes with it.
It probably couldn't happen but I don't think it is reasonable to say it shouldn't.
Also note that the 8 million dollar cap, while authentically what Long proposed, is a very simplistic system and coming to real power he might agree to a more flexible one. Say the Income Tax is replaced (via Amendment) with a Wealth tax, with an exemption of $3 million, and after that is levied marginally on average annual wealth at a rate of 1 percent per million, so that a person holding $103 million would owe the integral from zero to 100 percent on 100 million, which is to say 50 percent of that or $50 million. To maintain that level of wealth, the return on investment of the entire $103 million in one year would have to be $50 million, or 48.54%--I don't think there can be such an accomplished Captain of Industry in the annals of entrepreneurship, barring overtly criminal acts!
But suppose the average investor can one way or another reliably realize 5 percent interest. If we plot net earnings, that is annual wealth divided by 20 and then minus the progressive wealth tax above, the income curve peaks at $275,000 net when net computed worth is 8 million--that is, after the wealth tax. With no tax at all, it would be 400,000, so considered as an income tax it is 31.25 percent. But note that $8 million is hardly the peak; as wealth grows beyond that point, the take-home amount does decline, but remains positive until we reach levels of assets of $15.4 million--at which point Uncle Sam is taking the entire return on investment, or around $750,000. Note that if a person with an alternate source of income in which to live who therefore did not touch their investment started with $ 8 million in this system, over the course of some 25 years their net wealth would rise to nearly double, and then stabilize there, at nearly twice the cap Long proposed. And if that person were to suddenly start drawing from that stock, they'd have to deplete nearly half of it before they reached peak income at $8 million.
Now if a particularly sharp business person were able to consistently realize not 5 but ten percent, they would have peak income of $800,000 when their assets rose to $13 million, and would still be accruing more money than they are taxed when their assets have risen to well over $25.5 million.
So with a graduated wealth tax of this nature, it is possible for superior enterprise to accumulate considerably greater wealth despite the tax. This system is far more severe on the rich than any Western country's OTL tax system, yet clearly considerably more indulgent that a flat ceiling of S8 million. Under such a system, truly tremendous accumulations of wealth are impossible, but a great many individuals can enjoy holdings and incomes far above the average. The disincentive to continue investing, insofar as that is crucial, accumulates only gradually above the $3 million exemption. It might be remarked that incomes beyond the peak plummet to levels no higher than someone who achieves $3 million and holds it there without ever paying any tax, but the individuals matching this income on the high end own a lot more wealth than the untaxed richest do, some 7 times as much in the case with the 10 percent return on investment, or 4 times as much with a 5 percent return. Even at a lousy 1 percent return on investment income maximizes--at a lousy $35,000 per year which is chump change today but in 1935 dollars well over 10 times average annual incomes even in good business years--when assets are $4 million, and remain higher than the 3 million dollar breakpoint income at $5 million--it is impossible for it to rise to $ 8 million--for that goal, one must earn at least a 1.6 percent return, and will not be making any money to speak of. You have to push it up to 2.5 to make $ 8 million in assets equal the return from 3 million dollars not taxed.
Such a system will not capture as much from a given national income and wealth distribution as Long's would. But it sharply limits the size of maximum fortunes while leaving incentives to push for more income largely intact until wealth rises to levels in the ballpark of $ 8 million.
Remember that for people who have raised their wealth into these brackets to enjoy their earnings with as little siphoned off via Uncle Sam as possible, they must spend it as fast as it comes in. This accelerates the rate of "trickle down" considerably. Meanwhile investors who have not yet accumulated $3 million 1935 dollars have every incentive to stay in the game, and the sort of government revenues these wealth taxes imply seem quite ample for the Federal government to fund a wide variety of approaches to investment upkeep simultaneously--to manage the paperwork for small worker-investors, to provide matching funds and guarantees, to fund infrastructure and other Keynesian investments such as military munitions, research and development and so forth.
I make no mistake--the rich will absolutely hate this system. They would denounce it as the work of the devil and the end of civilization, and vow their lives to bringing it down. Vice versa, if we figure that the machinery of industry will not grind to a halt nor stagnate for generations, but grow at rates at least comparable to OTL less regulated capitalism, then the workers have won a great victory for them to defend, even if it remains true that a relative few skim off much greater fortunes than they enjoy from their labor--under this system it is much clearer how that concentration of wealth does provide directly for employment they need, and does guarantee their essential needs and fund many tangible benefits. As a victory for the working classes, they can be expected to defend it.
And where would fleeing capitalists go, in the 1930s? The entire world system had come down, opportunity was scarce anywhere. Insofar as Britain and France had managed to stabilize their fall, it was via manipulating the status of colonial holdings, and these are clearly a zero sum game relative to a horde of angry and frightened Americans whose mismanagement was the proximate cause of the global crash anyway. What kind of a welcome can they expect in either colonial/imperial system? Rather, if the poor and middling majority of Americans who stayed at home have any sort of success with their capped and wealth-transferring system, the metropolitan masses in France and Britain might start wondering if they can't do the same sort of thing themselves. This gives the old world empires some incentive to join with expatriate American former rich in a crusade, I suppose, but it also means that if the Share the Wealth system works, the American people have great potential to fight for their victory. They enjoy numbers as well as the industrial capacity to produce plenty of state of the art munitions, and a financial system that can leverage the funds to pay for them quickly too. European elites would be in a hell of a position trying to motivate smaller numbers of drafted Tommies or polous to fight for their sacred right to be poor and lorded over by people with wealth a thousand times their own, when these gentlemen had just mismanaged the whole global economy. They could of course try drafting larger numbers of colonial troops, whose peoples are even poorer than the European masses and even more blatantly exploited; that is sure to end well.
I have no doubt that anyone who tries this in the real world will have no easy path; the damage that the sectors of the population who stand to lose would do would be tremendous, and indeed the moral right of the majority to act in this way will be called into question to say the least.
But in terms of technical feasibility once established, I think that if one takes an honest look at the liabilities of the OTL global capitalist system as it has evolved, it is actually superior for both rich and poor countries, offering superior sustained rates of development for all with maximum political integration, while retaining the advantages of a laissez-faire economy and the morality that goes with it.
It probably couldn't happen but I don't think it is reasonable to say it shouldn't.
When did you meet all the very rich people in the world? I would be interested in your anecdotes or the survey you conducted to come to this conclusion.
But seriously, this is the same as saying that the very poor are all a bunch of feckless lazy idiots who are only poor because they couldn't be bothered to get a job. Which is obviously not true.
I haven't. Just looked at a few Fortune surveys and connected that with the media coverage of those listed. And I am not getting at rich people at all - lots of Mellons, Rockefellers, Peugeots, DuPonts (the odd serial killing body-builder aside) Cadburys, Courtaulds etc. leading lives of quiet respectability. And the late Duke of Westminster was a very decent man (him I did run into once). My point is that one of their most important functions is to invest and the other to be an early adopter of new goods and services. They can be saints like the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, civic benefactors like Nelson Rockefeller, crooks like Armand Hammer or Basil Zaharoff, eccentric recluses like Howard Hughes, keen scientists like Derek Jackson, art collectors and connoisseurs like Thyssen - it doesn't matter that much from a utilitarian point of view.
Poverty like riches has manifold causes but the very rich and the very poor display some interesting convergences in behaviour :- "The very poor can't afford to give a shit and the very rich can afford not to give a shit". Can't remember who said that but I think it was Warhol.
So it's important to realize that at the time this was being proposed, $5 million-$8 million was a huge fortune.
Did the Share your wealth movement ever say how they were going to achieve the goals listed here? 'Cuz that's the difficult part. A well implemented wealth tax can be effective. A poorly implemented one can be harmful.
fasquardon
They did had the money and the manpower to pull that off...if Huey Long won the presidency of course
You can read more about it here