The numbers may have changed a bit since 1900, when this appeared in "The Public" (of June 9) -- when a typical worker earned $1,000 a year -- but the point of this piece is worth our time today:
So conservative a man as Walter S. Logan, prominent at the New York city bar and but recently president of the New York State Bar association, is preaching a gospel of wealth limitation. He would start with a maximum of $10,000,000 and hold the possessions of individuals down to that amount by means of graduated income taxes and restrictions upon inheritances. The large public revenues resulting he would expend in the acquisition by the state of those franchises which, as he describes them, "have done so much to enrich its citizens at its expense." He suggests, for example, that New York state might buy and operate the New York Central railroad, while New York city might establish public ice plants and furnish ice to the people at nominal prices.
It is encouraging to find a man of Mr. Logan's professional, business and social environment exhibiting contempt for wealth accumulation and accumulators. But it is not so encouraging to find him so indifferent to the elementary principles of wealth distribution. If Mr. Logan were cross-examined upon his reasons for proposing the confiscation of fortunes in excess of $10,000,000, he would probably justify himself morally by insisting that no one can earn so much. Any other moral justification would be impossible. For if any man should earn more than $10,000,000 the state would have no more moral right to confiscate the excess than the whole. Earnings either are sacred to the last penny, or they are not sacred at all. The instant, therefore, that you empower the state to confiscate any excess of private earnings, that very instant you justify the state in making a total confiscation.
Yet Mr. Logan is right in supposing that no man earns $10,000,000. He would be right if he put it at $1,000,000. For it would take a five-dollar-a-day man some 650 years, without allowing him anything for expenses, to earn and save $1,000,000; and it is beyond the range of probability that any man, however gigantic his productive power, can productively earn and fairly save in a lifetime as much as a five-dollar-a-day man could earn in 650 years. But we are confronted with the fact that there are millionaires. It must be, then, that they get enormously more than they earn. How do they get it? If they do not earn it, but are honest, they must get it by means of legal privileges of some kind. The obvious method, then, for limiting unearned fortunes is to abolish legal privileges. It is the natural and just way, too. If that were done, fortunes would be limited as nature limits them—by the earnings of their owners.
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