Came across this quote, from Rexford Tugwell:
“If we lack purchasing power, we lack everything…. There is just one thing to do: Take incomes from where they are and place them where we need them.”
Tugwell was one of FDR’s “brain trust”; he was speaking of the depression of the 1930s, but he could have been speaking about today.
Quoted in William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, p451. Manchester adds, “To save the country by saving the banks, he [Tugwell] added, was like trying to revive a dying tree ‘by applying fertilizer to its branches instead of to its roots.’”
I thought Al Capone said that.
No, Al Capone was the guy who didn’t want to pay taxes on the money he stole.
Today he’d work on Wall Street.
Stealing is taking money from others by force. If government does it, it still is no different. Taxes are a publicly sanctioned form of stealing. For instance, making medical care a right requires that money be taken from others by force to pay for it. A “right” that breaks the right of others can not be a right; instead, it is a contradiction. There can be no such thing as a right to the rights of others! That is absurd.
It’s really not cool to try to make conservatives look bad by caricaturing their arguments like that.