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Wealth and Want | |||||||
... because democracy alone is not enough to produce widely shared prosperity. | |||||||
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http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/gaffney-mason_on-stan-sapiro.html In
Memoriam, Stan Sapiro
Mason Gaffney To live is to be fated to die; death has come to Stanley Sapiro. We
have lost a Great Georgist who was also a Great Man, rating a 2-column
obit in the L.A. Times, a newspaper he had often excoriated because
it "never met a sales tax it didn't like".
We have also lost a Great Lawyer, a Great Scholar, a Great Family Man,
and a Great and Generous
Friend. Los Angeles knew him well as an activist in court. He had sued
the Assessor of L.A. County to hurry up and raise the taxable valuation
of Malibu lands held speculatively by then-Governor Ronald Reagan.
Stan won, and Reagan's land taxes rose by a factor of six. When the
California Supreme Court dawdled over the case, he sued Chief Justice
Rose Bird to follow the Constitution and hurry it up, which she then
had to do. In 1971 he sued the Assessor to hurry up and deny
preferential low tax valuations to private country clubs that
discriminate against Jews and other ethnic groups. In this case,
amazingly, the Calif. Supreme Court ruled the private country clubs
may continue to exclude Jews and others, while still enjoying their low
tax
valuations. One of the most powerful Jewish communities in the country
might have taken the lead, but private Jewish country clubs may also
exclude gentiles, by inference. It
took our man Stanley to bring a case in the general public interest,
and challenge the whole notion of underassessing the land of any
private country club.
Some critics tried to dismiss him as narrow, but Stan, reading widely, quoted from such varied writers as Goethe, Thoreau, FDR, Andrew Jackson, Jonathan Swift, W.S. Gilbert, Fred Allen, J.S. Mill, The Bible, Carl Schurz, Mark Twain, Adam Smith, Joseph Fels, David Stockman, Michael Boskin, Eddie Cantor, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller: some to extol and some to scorn, but all to edify and entertain. Goodbye, Stan, I loved you well, as did many others. Your spirit lives on in the lives you have touched. It is now for us, the living, to take from your life increased devotion to that cause for which you gave the last full measure of yours. |
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Wealth
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... because democracy
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prosper
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