[Peace-discuss] Right to wealth

[C. G. Estabrook]

This would be true only if the owners of wealth came by it honestly and
had a right to it.  The US is the most unequal society among the
industrialized states and is becoming more so.  Even "training to enhance
employment opportunities" is a matter of making the rich richer, as has
been understood since the Enlightenment:

"It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our
farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our
masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that
drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the
kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their
knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him
... What effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him? ... He
is free, you say. Ah, that is his misfortune. The slave was precious to
his master because of the money he had cost him. But the handicraftsman
costs nothing to the rich voluptuary who employs him ... These men, it is
said, have no master -- they have one, and the most terrible, the most
imperious of masters, that is need. It is this that reduces them to the
most cruel dependence." --Simon Linguet, 1767


On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 Dlind49 at aol.com wrote:

> The concept that you can take $$$$$ away from one group of persons
> based on income to give to someone else is criminal.  It would be
> better to spend tax $$ on education and training to enhance employment
> opportunities for this segment of the population that is below poverty
> line to to inadequate employment and other factors but then this has
> been tried before with no success!
> 
> doug 
>