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How to Make Inequality Obsolete
Only a couple of centuries ago, owning another person — slavery, that is — was considered a normal thing to do.
But, starting in the late 18th century, slavery was abolished throughout Europe and the Americas (in 1793 in Upper Canada) after the rise of an abolition movement based on Enlightenment ideas about human rights and freedoms.
Occupy Toronto protest (photo: PJMixer)
Once considered acceptable, slavery came to be seen as repugnant. As U.S. political scientist John Mueller puts it: “Slavery became controversial, then peculiar and then obsolete.”
The power of social movements to sweep away ideas solidly embraced by the established order seems to be intuitively grasped by the Occupy Wall Street crowd, even if it’s lost on commentators who dismiss the movement as leaderless, unfocused and short on perfect sound bites.
Already, the occupiers have made an economic system that has dominated for the past 30 years — based on unbridled greed at the top and indifference to the well-being of the bottom 99 per cent — suddenly the focus of attention.
Last week, Brian Topp, a leading NDP leadership contender, actually raised out loud the idea of taxing the rich — a cause the NDP has backed off in recent years as business and conservative commentators have dominated public discourse with an ideology insisting that we must provide ever bigger “incentives” for those at the top.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was quick to try to shut down Topp’s “dreamy ideas,” arguing that taxing the rich “doesn’t produce the volume of revenue that you need in order to run a country.”
Perhaps not enough to run a whole country, but it could sure make a hefty contribution.
Adding a new marginal tax rate of 60 per cent to those earning over $500,000 a year, and a 70 per cent rate to those earning over $2.5 million a year — rates that would simply restore the progressivity that existed during Canada’s booming postwar decades — would raise almost $8 billion a year, according to Osgoode Hall tax professor Neil Brooks.
Yet this $8 billion interests Flaherty so little that he can’t be bothered to collect it.
Compare this to Flaherty’s relentless pursuit of spending cuts, no matter how tiny the saving. He’s refused to back down for instance on closing the St. John’s maritime rescue centre — which answers hundreds of distress calls annually — even though its closure will save less than $56 million, a pittance compared to $8 billion.
Flaherty has assured us that, while Americans have legitimate concerns about inequality, Canada has a “very progressive tax system.”
But it’s Flaherty who’s got the dreamy ideas here. Our tax system as a whole — including sales, excise and property taxes as well as income taxes — isn’t actually progressive. A study by Marc Lee of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives showed that when all taxes are included, the poorest 10 per cent of Canadians — those earning less than $13,500 a year — paid fully 30.7 per cent of their tiny incomes in tax, while the top 1 per cent — with incomes above $300,000 — had a slightly lighter burden, paying 30.5 per cent of their incomes in tax.
While Flaherty seems determined to shelter the rich from progressive taxation, there was no such catering to them on the part of Henry Simons, a founder of the conservative Chicago School of Economics.
Simons considered excessive inequality “unlovely” and supported progressive taxation, arguing that capitalism would never survive in a democracy if the general public didn’t benefit from it.
Even Adam Smith, considered the father of capitalism, favoured higher taxes on the rich, and seemed to have people like Flaherty in mind when he warned that the “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least to neglect persons of poor and mean condition . . . is . . . the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”
The Occupy Wall Street movement has made unbridled greed — so distasteful to Adam Smith and Henry Simons — suddenly controversial.
No wonder the established order is rattled. A system it has benefited from handsomely could soon be considered peculiar, and then — dare we dream? — obsolete.
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21 Comments so far
Show AllFight the rich, not their wars.
Slavery never "became obsolete", it just morphed from chattel slavery to wage slavery.
Many wage slaves are finally dealing with the denial syndrome and pushing back, now that slavery is morphing back closer to chattel slavery,
Slavery hasn't gone anywhere except out of sight to myopic United Statesians.There are 27 million slaves in the world today. Not wage slaves---actual slaves. Owned persons--and not corporate persons.they live in conditions that in many places is far worse than the horrific conditions of antebellum US slavery, since slaves then were expensive, therefore valuable, therefore kept alive to work. A slave then cost about the same as a small house; now in some places slaves can be bought for less than $5, so they are worked to death and then new people purchased. See Kevin Bales, Modern Slavery, see this:
www.ted.com/talks/kevin_bales_how_to_combat_modern_slavery.html
Linda has nailed it.
>>"As U.S. political scientist John Mueller puts it: “Slavery became controversial, then peculiar and then obsolete.”<<
In the case of slavery, I think there should have been an aversion, a revulsion, as something "obscene" and "repulsive", and not just "controversial, then peculiar and then obsolete". And no, it should not have taken a so-called western "Enlightenment" to realize that slavery was something unacceptable, especially for a "civilization" that largely considered itself "Christian".
Other than that minor objection, I am somewhat of a fan of Linda McQuaig and have recommended her book "It's the Crude, Dude: War, Big Oil and the Fight for the Planet" a few times here.
McQuaig's recent book "The Trouble with Billionaires: Why Too Much Money at the Top Is Bad for Everyone" too is a great read, and she has written it with a co-author, Neil Brooks, a professor of tax law. From the back cover of the book:
*****************************************************
"Imagine this: you are given one dollar every second.
At that rate, after one minute, you would have 60 dollars. After twelve days, you would be a millionaire – something beyond the wildest dreams of most people on Earth.
But how long would it take to become a billionaire?
Well, at that rate, it would take almost 32 years.
Being a billionaire isn't just beyond the wildest dreams of most people on Earth, it's likely beyond their comprehension.
Another way to grasp the sheer size of the fortunes of billionaires is to imagine how long it would take Bill Gates, generally considered the world's richest man, to count his $53 billion fortune. If he counted it at the same rate – one dollar every second – and he counted non-stop day and night, he would have it all counted in 1,680 years.
Or another way to look at it: if Bill Gates had started counting his fortune at that rate back in 330 AD – the same year the Roman emperor Constantine had his wife boiled alive and chose Byzantium as the Empire's new capital – he would just be finishing up now."
Industrialism, machinery, coal/steam power, electricity, oil,etc... Made chattel slavery obsolete for the first time in world history. The oligarchs try to retain control over this industrial means of production (ie. wage/debt serfdom), but they will lose their grip here also. Slowly but surely, we're making our way to the light, and the oligarchic principle (ie. most humans must be forced to live as animals, beasts-of-burden, so that a few people can live as humans), will also become obsolete.
I agree, lnb. The availability of fossil fuels and the means to exploit them as "energy slaves" was also a factor in the ending of human slavery. I think is a very important point. It was not just a result of a so-called "Enlightenment". If that were so, near-slavery conditions would not be imposed today in the factories of some countries so that the rich world can enjoy their cheap stuff bought with fiat currency. Nope!
As to your last sentence above, yes, I too believe so.
How to make inequality obsolete?
Remain leaderless
This is an over-simplification and just plain wishful thinking.
I was disappointed that the article failed to answer the question.
How to make inequality obsolete?
I can think of 2 that would go a long way toward achieving it:
communal ownership -- the communist approach
or
non-ownership -- the native American approach
"Simons considered excessive inequality “unlovely” and supported progressive taxation, arguing that capitalism would never survive in a democracy if the general public didn’t benefit from it."
Yup. So the current oligarchs response is to subvert democracy.
Too many activists are their own worst enemies. If the gentleman holding the sign is inviting the police officer to join the movement, he's not exactly presenting himself in a way that he can expect to be taken seriously.
We forget that what we're accustomed to looks normal to us, but not to others. Same goes for some of our opinions. Presenting ourselves as a tiny subset of the population marginalizes the movement. IMHO that's one of the main reasons the environmental movement lost the war despite winning a few battles.
The guy is holding up a sign, and is looking AWAY from the cop, jax.
"We forget that what we're accustomed to looks normal to us, but not to others." There's no "WE" here. You are neither speaking for me, nor the majority of CD readers
Your whole second paragraph also sounds as if we're some cozy knitting circle that you're a member of: "Presenting ourselves as a tiny subset of the population marginalizes the movement." Say wot? What part of "We are the 99%!!" don't you get?
"What part of "We are the 99%!!" don't you get?"
Well, Ava, the delusionally presumptive part, of course; and I quote "There's no "WE" here. You are neither speaking for me, nor the majority of CD readers"; ah, nor the 99%.
The 99% movement is about an unjust SYSTEM that we all (except the 1%) suffer under, but the "we" is quite diverse.
Avanti,
I question the usefulness of attack to promote dialogue.
billijaxsin,
I too am perplexed by: "Presenting ourselves as a tiny subset of the population marginalizes the movement". Please clarify or expand.
Thanks,
Grant
Yeah, and I question your reply. How was that an attack?
Seemingly, Argentina’s re-elected president has a “project” to profoundly change their society using Argentina’s resources to raise incomes, create jobs, restore the country's industrial capacity, reduce poverty and maintain an economic boom.
Since she and her predecessor as president, her husband, first moved into Argentina's presidential palace in 2003, the income gap between the country's rich and poor has been reduced by nearly half. Meanwhile, according to the International Monetary Fund's numbers for 2002-2011, Argentina's real GDP has grown 94%, the fastest in the western hemisphere.
Helped by high demand for soy and other agricultural commodities. And by resisting the neocon recipes (Milton Friedman -- Chicago School of Economics). 24 percent Inflation is still threatening economic stability.
Maybe she can also go the rest of the way, not only redistributing the wealth with cash transfers to the impoverished Argentinians but also fundamentally changing the economic system.
It would be necessary because Argentinas industrial agriculture is at a slow but steady pace destroying the land.
OCW is creating new ways of comprehending and bending reality to fit our needs in the 21st Century. The creative energy and alternative thinking being applied to arrive at desired outcomes is just beginning. Each OCW site is different, yet we are united as one. Transcending the current captured and corrupt political system rather than confronting it directly allows us to focus on those things that are having a direct negative impact on our lives and mitigating them. As the political parties dig in their heels, they have no one to fight but themselves. In time, given widespread and accelerating change they will implode from their own corruption.
The central point where we are all truly equal is---Nobody can do their job alone, and nobody can work more than one day at a time, no matter what their job is. Our daily labor is the one point of value and power we have left---and it's time to WALK OUT on Profit as the central mechanism of injustice (Profit = take more than you give). If we do that together we cannot lose because Profit is an addict that must have our labor to go on. Let's starve it to death and share equal access to what our work produces!
Please check out this proposal for direct worldwide action called WOOP: We the Workers of the World Walk Out On Profit, at jackdempseywriter.wordpress.com