Suzanne LaFollette Quotes
Until economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real freedom for anybody.
Suzanne LaFollette, 1893-1983, Politician and Writer, Quoted on Quotemeonit.com, May 17, 2002
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
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At the time of this quotation, the nation had gone through more than 3 decades of enormous increase in prosperity for the wealthy, and modest gains for the highly skilled, technically trained workers. However, correcting for inflation, average salaries did not increase at all. The middle class was particularly hard hit. Only 20 percent of the population benefitted from the growth at all; however, the 1 percent had rarely prospered more. Kenworthy’s principle did not apply for this period of American history.
The crisis of inequality of income and wealth has occurred seven times in American history.
He was answering a question of why many people in Eastern Europe were not more enthusiastic about their freedom and democracy.
An income tax had been instituted during the Civil War but had lapsed. Existing taxes were all excise or head taxes—very regressive. Later there was a political movement to bring back the income tax with the intention of taxing all income equally. There was a titanic struggle which culminated in a Constitutional Amendment allowing the income tax. None of the original politicians, for or against, the income tax could never imagine an income tax that would charge lower rates for investment income. That was the entire purpose of the income tax at the beginning—to tax investment (unearned) income. The “capital gains tax” was the creative way of the rich getting back some of what they thought the lost when the income tax was instituted.
In modern America, there are two political views of this notion. The one held by a small majority of the population is Trenchard’s quotation taken literally. Their view is that there if the is no way to maintain liberty if there is too wide a gap between the rich and the rest of the population. The second variant, held by many conservatives limits the equality to equality of opportunity. They are loathe to take any position that says that any gap between the rich and the remainder of the citizens might be too large. They would particularly disagree with the first sentence of another Trenchard quotation, {627024}.
