Wealth Concentration and the Corruption of Government

The more corrupt a government the easier wealth can use it. Where legislation is to be bought, the rich make the laws; where justice is to be purchased, the rich have the ear of the courts. And if, for this reason, great wealth does not absolutely prefer corrupt government to pure government, it becomes none the less a corrupting influence. A community composed of very rich and very poor falls an easy prey to whoever can seize power. The very poor have not spirit and intelligence enough to resist; the very rich have too much at stake. -- Henry George, Political Dangers (The second essay in Social Problems, 1883)

I've been rereading this fine book of essays, and decided I needed to put it onto the Wealth and Want website.  Putting it up is, of course, fairly easy, but indexing it into the system of themes there -- something approaching 1000 different themes, last time I looked -- takes time.  But this is so timely that I've posted the essay without waiting to finish the cross-referencing.  (To see what I'm talking about, take a look at the first essay, The Increasing Importance of Social Questions, noticing particularly the sidebar to the right.  You'll see themes like technological progress, infrastructure, conservatism, prosperity, justice, charity and wealth concentration.  If you follow one of those links, you'll find excerpts of various Georgist writings -- Henry George's own writings, or writings of others, which speak to that topic.  And in the right sidebar of each theme, you'll find links to other related themes.  Themes are something like tags, which I wasn't familiar with when I started creating WealthandWant.com.)

The premise of the Wealth and Want website is that a democratic republic alone is not enough to produce widely-shared prosperity.  And I'm pretty sure that no one in either of the two main parties knows what it takes to produce widely-shared prosperity, either.  I believe that a thorough reading of the 25 or so "essential documents" on the Wealth and Want site would put a new administration on the road to knowing. 

And then we circle back to the point that Henry George was making in the paragraph I quoted above. If you need a reminder about the degree of concentration of wealth in America, take a look at this post: Spreading the Wealth and these pages: Wealth Concentration Tables from 2004 SCF: Bottom 90%, Next 9% and Top 1% and Wealth Concentration Tables from 2004 SCF: 50-40-5-4-1

If you want details on concentration of income, read this post:  Spreading the "wealth" -- this time, let's talk about income.