The Distribution Of Wealth In America: Consequences, Causes, And Remedies

from Washington’s Blog:

There is no better way to describe the progressive activists of 1885-1920 than in President Eisenhower’s phrase for what American democracy requires: “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry.” Because they confronted the Wall Street system when it was new, they saw it naked and with terms for comparison fresh in mind. Its foundations, effects, methods and differences from former practices and conditions were starkly obvious, plainly remarked and often better understood than after its operations began to be taken for granted in the terms proposed by its salesmen. This tended to make progressive analyses and responses penetratingly knowledgeable and ground them firmly in unadulterated contact with primary American civic traditions. “The most important public issues of that day [1900-1914] were … corporate power, finance capitalism, popular democracy, and the rule of the state and federal governments as shapers of public policy.” “Since the seventeenth century, financial questions … [and] differences over currency and the related subject of banking” typically lay at the center of “basic American social and political” contentions. Progressives grasped from the start the legislative character of the Wall Street system’s foundations and its essential basis in corporate and financial law. In accord with traditional American political practice, they judged the proper solution to be rescinding its legal enablements by legislation and replacing them with enactments in the public interest and for the general welfare instead.

image/harvarddatascience.com

Progressive practice and thinking highlights the moral and ethical issues involved in economic and political life as the basis of our general welfare. The key objective is economic democracy, which is to be revived by direct citizen action disempowering predatory wealth by means of law in order to universalize genuine opportunities for middle-class livelihood in an economy that works for everyone, instead of for one in twenty or one in a thousand. As Senator George Norris put it in 1931, “organized wealth has invented a new form of slavery by which the hands of labor are manacled in a new kind of involuntary servitude.” Facing this, the progressive “effort was to find a new equivalent for the old opportunities offered by the frontier, … an attempt to recreate the equality of opportunity that has been lost sight of in the society that was arising.”

From “Populist” times, Progressive economic thought focused on “the middleman,” the toll-taker who inserts his extractive contrivances between the public and public necessities and utilities, and on the legal enablements of this by law and by willful failures of lawless government to enforce law. It sees the “political problem” as essentially an economic problem, an engineering problem. It is practical and pragmatic, intent on appropriate effective action, not abstract analysis or construction of organizational power bases.

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