Confiscations; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
The average man makes a better soldier than he does a voter. He can get
the range of an object easier than he can comprehend an economic truth -
this one, for instance: If the capitalists have obtained possession of
the money issued in the past, what is to prevent them from getting
possession of all that will be issued in the future? His answer will be
to issue more. He has been told so by his political mentor. When the man
with the ballot loses confidence in this mentor, he will start a game of
his own, and then the jig will be up with that idiot. We use the word
idiot advisedly here. When a tax was assessed against the incomes of the
rich, this driveler would score a point gained in favor of the people.
This claim of itself shows the institution to which he should be
consigned.
Victoria, Empress and Queen, rules a country where, pauperism is
steadily on the increase, and the potter's field received the bodies of
eighty of her subjects that were frozen to death in London in four days
of January last. Yet the rich have been paying an income tax in that
country for generations past.
When the rich merchant, or rich anything else, insures what he is
dealing in, he adds the cost of his policy to the thing he sells. The
income tax is but another premium, and he tags that on where he pinned
the other. The laborer has always paid the expenses of the rich, and
always will. The laborer can never dictate terms to the rich. The labor
leaders even have come to recognize the hopelessness of the unequal
contest. The power of the rich to do as they like can never be destroyed
while they are allowed to retain the riches that gives them this power.
A readjustment and a limit set to the amount an individual can own is
the only remedy. And the sooner that unassailable truth is recognized
and acted upon, the sooner will you get rid of the lobbiest and the
pauper.
II.
We need more money per capita: say some more would-be leaders, who have
found the only way out of the land of bondage. Increase the currency to
$50 per capita, and business and prosperity will once more fill the
land. Money has become scarcer, they continue, and therefore dearer.
Those who contracted monetary obligations last week find that they are
now paying more for the use of that money than it was worth when the
debt was made.
This is a hardship on the borrower, and can be prevented by increasing
the amount of money in circulation.
This is the very essence of what is claimed by those who are for
increasing the volume of money in circulation. Money has changed in
value, and those who are mortgaged, or otherwise under interest-paying
obligations, have found that money is scarcer, in this instance through
contraction of the currency, and therefore harder to get.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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