Wealth and Want
... because democracy alone is not enough to produce widely shared prosperity.
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Class War

Joseph Fels:   True Christianity and My Own Religious Beliefs
Do you question the relationship between taxation and righteousness? Let us see. If government is a natural growth, then surely God's natural law provides food and sustenance for government as that food is needed; for where in Nature do we find a creature coming into the world without timely provision of natural food for it? It is in our system of taxation that we find the most emphatic denial of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, because,
  • first, in order to meet our common needs, we take from individuals what does not belong to us in common;
  • second, we permit individuals to take for themselves what does belong to us in common;
  • thus, third, under the pretext of taxation for public purposes, we have established a system that permits some men to tax other men for private profit.
Does not that violate the natural, the divine law? Does it not surely beget wolfish greed on the one hand, and gaunt poverty on the other? Does it not surely breed millionaires on one end of the social scale and tramps on the other end? Has it not brought into civilization a hell, of which the savage can have no conception? Could any better system be devised for convincing men that God is the father of a few and the stepfather of the many? Is not that destructive of the sentiment of brotherhood? With such a condition, how is it possible for men in masses to obey the new commandment, "that ye love one another"? What could more surely thrust men apart? What could more surely divide them into warring classes? ... read the whole letter

Henry George: The Crime of Poverty  (1885 speech)

... Nature gives to labour, and to labour alone; there must be human work before any article of wealth can be produced; and in the natural state of things the man who toiled honestly and well would be the rich man, and he who did not work would be poor. We have so reversed the order of nature that we are accustomed to think of the workingman as a poor man.

And if you trace it out I believe you will see that the primary cause of this is that we compel those who work to pay others for permission to do so. You may buy a coat, a horse, a house; there you are paying the seller for labour exerted, for something that he has produced, or that he has got from the man who did produce it; but when you pay a man for land, what are you paying him for? You are paying for something that no man has produced; you pay him for something that was here before man was, or for a value that was created, not by him individually, but by the community of which you are a part. What is the reason that the land here, where we stand tonight, is worth more than it was twenty-five years ago? What is the reason that land in the centre of New York, that once could be bought by the mile for a jug of whiskey, is now worth so much that, though you were to cover it with gold, you would not have its value? Is it not because of the increase of population? Take away that population, and where would the value of the land be? Look at it in any way you please.  ... read the whole speech

Buffett: Prop 13

 

at one time three classes: land holders, business class, laborers ... land-capital-labor!

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Wealth and Want
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... because democracy alone hasn't yet led to a society in which all can prosper