Economic Injustice Quotes
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910. Ironically, during the McCarthy period and the Red Scare of the 1950s, some of the right wingers charged that Mark Twain’s writing was “Communist Propaganda”. Most of the accusers had never read most of Train’s work. At the time, the Communists had condemned the racial segregation that was then legal in America and most of the staunch Southern segregationists accused anyone who attacked segregation as a communist. Twain was one of the leading voices against American racism. As for communism, the accusers of Train had probably never read this particular quotation. Twain was an early severe critic of communism and used his favorite weapon—humor—to attack it.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910. He was instrumental in being one of the major writers who made the American public aware of the fact that the very wealthy sometimes systematically committed crimes involving money and in much larger crimes than the poor criminals.
There were almost no Blacks who agreed with him on this point. Nor do the vast majority of economists today. But Friedman believed that if there were no minimum wage scale, more lower wage workers would find jobs and learn skills to justify a higher wage later in their careers. To some extent, this used to be so for those occupations which require experience and/or apprenticeship. However, by the 21st century, people in minimum wage jobs can, from their jobs, rarely learn enough to economically justify a higher wage position. A minimum wage job became a dead end job for all but students and people in between other endeavors. Therefore the advocates of minimum wage argue that there should be a living wage so that as President Obama said, “No one should work full time, and not make enough to emerge from poverty.”
Ford was then 74 years old and had become a very different man than in his youth when he was the hero of labor. He was very paranoid at this time. He even thought that financiers were actually backing the labor unions because their purpose was to go to war against Hitler who Ford greatly admired and supported. See {642379}. He claimed that the way they would do it is to fund the labor unions so most workers would join unions. This he thought would eliminate competition and lower workers’ wages. When workers’ wages were pushed low enough, the workers would demand American entry into the war to create government spending on armaments and a labor shortage to drive wages up again. There was not a single financier who was actually paying or lending any money to labor unions, and most industrialists other than Ford complained that labor unions would always demand higher wages. Ford’s son Edsel was the chief operating officer of Ford Motor Company, and did his best to work around his father to keep the company healthy and deal with a terrible labor relations problem his father caused.
In his economic view, managers, accountants, attorneys, owners, shareholders, landlords, were all supported by the workers who have to support themselves and all the others.
Abrams originated this famous phrase which many have been used subsequently for various “socialized” government benefits that were available to the rich but not the poor. He was referring to the fact that at the time, the government provided housing assistance to the rich by having federally insured mortgages and granting tax deductions for the interest in home mortgages, but there was no assistance to the poor who could only afford to rent and had no tax deductions nor was there any federal public housing assistance. During the Great Recession the phrase was often used when the government gave bail out money to General Motors and the largest banks who were close to bankruptcy, but the landscaping gardener or the hot dog vendor whose business was falling because of the recession were told that is the capitalist system—there are some winners and some losers. The government officials who advocated the bailout did not disagree about the fairness and appropriateness of the Abrams phrase but if they had not bailed the banks out, the entire economic system of the country would probably have collapsed and the ensuing depression would hurt the average worker and the poor even more. Related to the recent “too big to fail” concept.
To some people this was an extreme concept of duty and patriotism of the British in their day of empire.
