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Just stumbled across this, and I have to say Justice Brandeis nailed it (which is what I would expect from a Supreme Court Justice):
Brandeis said, "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
I for one would like the leadership of this Nation to demonstrate that they are smarter than me.
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I wonder what the opposite of that statement would be?
"We can have a democracy, or we can have a state that seizes private assets and redistributes wealth, but we can't have both"
What would that be called? That's not democracy either. There's got to be something other than those two choices...
:patriot:
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Wags wrote:
[quote=guitarist]
I wonder what the opposite of that statement would be?
"We can have a democracy, or we can have a state that seizes private assets and redistributes wealth, but we can't have both"
What would that be called? That's not democracy either. There's got to be something other than those two choices...
:patriot:
Call it democracy or anything else, just show me an example of any civilization in the history of humankind that did not redistribute wealth or seize private assets. That is a prerequisite for a functional society. All those that have come before us have failed due to some combination of concentration of wealth and overuse/depletion of the available resource.
Yep, that is essentially what progressive taxation is about. The breakdown of the parallel between Brandeis' statement and guitarist's is that Brandeis statement was related to a more particular group - "great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few" - whereas guitarist's implies a generalized action taken "against" the whole. I think Brandeis' point is that when you have so much wealth concentrated in so few hands, then those with that much wealth can essentially buy the government into doing what they desire even if it is contrary to the desires of a large majority of the population. Of course, that is an oversimplification because as long as the government is truly a representative republic, then if the disparity between the wealthiest and the rest of society becomes too great then the only way the wealthy can stop the rest of the populous from taking more of their wealth is to overthrow the representative republic.
As far as the justification for using progressive taxation to address the problem - the top two percent of wealth holders in the US hold over 50 percent of the assets of the nation (or top one percent has about 40 percent, or top 10 percent have 70 percent of the assets - take your pick). Is it unfair to tax them at a rate that makes them responsible for providing the same percent of the revenue to run the government as they hold of the nation's wealth? (Of course, the answer one comes to with respect to that question involves making a LOT of value judgments.)
