Wealth is power. Someone with 8 million in 1934 or 150 million today can't possibly spend all that on gratifying themselves, except in the sense that sheer ostentation, displaying their wealth, is gratifying.
What they can do with that much money, or ten or a hundred times it, is have control over a vast enterprise that means in essence political control over the lives of those dependent on it, and power in the economy at large. Productive enterprise takes on aspects of politics, of games of conquest and control. Wealth that is permitted to concentrate on the principle that whatever someone owns is presumed to be theirs by right creates an aristocracy and makes a mockery of democracy. That is the problem, if one is a democrat anyway, that Long was tapping into outrage against.
It is one thing if the aristocracy of wealth is automatically steered, as the acolytes of laissez-faire capitalism solemnly assure us is the case due to natural law, to provide the best possible outcome for the masses at large. Long, and Roosevelt's New Dealers, and the rather popular Communists of the day, were all operating in a situation where the "smart" capitalists with "acumen" had delivered global disaster. Only by believing that any possible alternative whereby the people organized democratically "interfere" in "free markets" the outcome must be still worse than tens of millions starving and unemployed can one conclude that unfettered capitalism is still the only just system and also the best bet for the working majority.
Which is what the naysayers of this thread are saying. However bad the Depression was, they assure us the alternative would be worse, because of capital flight and capital strike.
Well, perhaps it is quite true that a system as bloody simplistic as Huey Long's would indeed have been more disastrous. Because quite obviously people who enjoy levels of power that 1930s billionaires and modern trillionaires do won't surrender that power meekly, and there would be some question what kind of administration of collective wealth would replace the straightforward "right" of people like that to do as they damned well pleased. Some naysaying against Long's system could be in favor of a more effective alternative.
But a whole lot of it is clearly in favor of acceptance of the simple right of the rich to do as they see fit, because it is "their money."
My own leftist perspective comes in part from my disapproval of what they tend to do with wealth and the mechanisms they create to perpetuate poverty, rather than "a rising tide lifting all boats" automatically which JFK, as yet another acolyte of private wealth, so trustingly told us we should believe.
Anyone who has played the board game of Monopoly can understand that in a market system, wealth is an automatic loading of the dice in favor of the wealthy. A leaner investor and a better heeled one may be facing the exact same risks in considering a possible business investment, but the former is subjectively risking everything they have managed to accumulate on this opportunity, while the other one can much better afford the downside if things do not work out. Assuming both are equally informed and intelligent, their foreseen outcomes are not the same. Therefore if there is no countervailing principle of wealth redistribution downward, fortunes automatically accumulate and consolidate, since the natural countervailing tendencies in the marketplace operate on the leaner and fatter investor entirely the same--if that is, we assume the system is honest and rules are fairly enforced. In fact, illegal manipulations, along with laws that are written for the convenience of the rich allowing legal recourses only the richer can afford, and political influence in the legal system, all add another layer of transfer of wealth from poorer to richer that reinforces and accelerates the natural tendency of all wealth to concentrate in a few hands.
As the author says, come down from the ivory tower a bit and consider the lay of the land in the mid-1930s when Huey Long was actually around to say these things. From a radical point of view this was a rare opportunity, when the power of wealth was suffering from a stroke and its moral credibility was massively tarnished, for a democratic people to seize the day and rewrite the rules.
Quite naturally the rich ruling classes would react with deliberation and some anger.
But do we really believe here that men like Donald Trump (to use a particularly familiar modern example), or Kenneth Lay to go back to the Enron schemes, or the founding Rockefeller to use someone known to the history of the 1930s, or J.P. Morgan for a more recent example of the same, all acquired their commanding levels of wealth because they were that much smarter than the average person? Or had some mystical gift of money-making denied ordinary mortals? Well, they certainly all did have the latter--they had the previously accumulated capital that 99 percent of us will never see to get them into the game.
But I believe if you handed any of us the same initial bankroll, quite a few of us could do better. A certain degree of ruthlessness is also required to make the maximum gains of course! So that is what we revere when we revere the people who have built up the largest fortunes--previous inherited fortune plus sociopathic ruthlessness. They are not men of commanding intellect; they hire people who are reasonably bright, and every other aspect of wealth they claim to "create" is actually at best managed by them, drawn from the ordinary work of ordinary workers.
From my perspective, it is the workers of the world who create wealth first of all, and when we raise the question of ownership by right, a certain degree of redistribution downward again seems to be only just and indeed necessary.
Especially if one values competition! Without some mechanism to bleed the wealth back downward again, we are doomed to a world owned by a handful of super wealthy oligarchs, and if you take a look at the "small businesses" that dominate the landscape and scoop up most revenue you will find they are overwhelmingly franchises and other partnership schemes that pay a tithe directly or indirectly to these mega-oligarchs, and are controlled by them, not their nominal small owners.
Now then, it becomes plain why simply passing Long's Share The Wealth program (I've never seen it referred to as "Share Your Wealth" or "Share Our Wealth" either) as legislation in House and Senate and having a President sign it into law will not simply happen. Even in the Depression the wealthy threatened by it would, before trying to slip away (to where, exactly? Canada? Britain? Nazi Germany? Japan? France?) with their "assets" somehow in pocket, first stand and fight to control the country they already effectively ruled. You'd have to get rid of most Senators and Congressmen to get laws like this passed, and FDR would not sign it (which is why Long wanted to undermine his chances of reelection in '36, which would get a Republican in, believing the people would then elect himself in 1940). And if passed of course the Courts would start invalidating it as unConstitutional. I'm not sure on which Constitutional clauses they'd base this actually, but I'm sure they'd find something and stand by it. So to say "what if Share The Wealth were applied" is either to postulate an ASB scenario--which critics more than supporters of the premise have done here--or to game out a revolutionary crisis in which the machinery of government is rapidly and efficiently replaced pretty much entirely in one politically guided surge. Violence would certainly happen! Perhaps not so much violence as to ruin the material assets the people would be seizing very much, if the movement were very popular and sectors rather accustomed to violence such as the military and many police and private security went along with, putting their interests as poor people and citizens ahead of their immediate orders. But it would take a revolution.
In considering the effects of capital flight and strikes of capital, then, we have to imagine them in the context of such a violent revolutionary struggle, not in the context of Congress just producing a paper coup overnight. Either the violence comes before the act of Congress, or immediately after, but it will be part of what happens.
Wealth, in its nature, boils down to material assets. So many hundreds of acres of land, a factory of so many hundred thousand cubic feet capable of inputting so many tons of raw material and outputting so many tons of finished goods with a given labor force, warehouses with so many product items stacked in them, so many miles of railroad and electric power lines connected to junctions and generators. The rich can take their beautiful minds with their brilliant business schemes over the border, and enjoy a certain amount of credit when the get there, but they can't pick up the factories and railroad mileage and warehouses full of auto parts and take them with them! To a great extent, information is needed so the material goods flow effectively, reaching the markets that can pay for their final purchase and consumption thus providing the revenue that funds the next iteration of production and any expansion that might occur. The rich can sabotage that, by burning their records and leaving the management of the physical capital in the hands of people with no experience in these matters.
But when all that is done, assuming mass flight of those rich enough to suffer from the wealth cap after either they wake up in ASB scenario with this deed done and no inclination to fight it out in the courts, let alone the streets, or else they have lost the fight they did wage but it didn't utterly devastate everything because they were outnumbered and outswarmed, and so they cut and ran rather hastily--the material wealth is still there, the factories and fields and railroads are still there, and the men and women who showed up every morning to man the machines and the plows are still there too. All they need is someone who can tell them when to show up and do their routine work that they well know how to do, and when not to. And in a pinch, deprived of their former managers, I do think they can learn to figure this out for themselves!
So say something as simplistic as a wealth cap with redistribution of everything over 8 million 1935 dollar individual fortunes were in place. No enterprise reasonably assessed at over 8 million dollars could exist as the owned property of one person. But then again, it could hardly be something that one person productively operated either! Why not simply credit the wealth the enterprise represents to the workers who work in it, equally? How many firms that were valued at 800 million dollars in the 1930s, or even in 1928 before the crash, had fewer than 100 workers in them?
The fact is, even assuming that the civil war between propertarians and share-the-welathers did not go much deeper into American society than just the rich themselves versus the poor majority (we would expect tens of millions much too poor to be personally affected by the 8 million dollar cap to line up with their financial betters, but pretend that does not happen) still pretty quickly a hierarchy of effective power will emerge anyway, I suppose. On paper, big enterprises will be owned collectively by their workers--but in practice most of these workers will let authority slip into relatively few hands. Those individuals, either by impressive vision combined with acumen, or by chicanery, will wind up in effect controlling the concentrated wealth. An effective system will remain being about power, and won't be truly egalitarian.
But we can legitimately wonder, would the dynamics of the new system with a wealth cap be substantially changed? Will it necessarily be any less efficient than the old system of rule of unlimited wealth, or might it evolve to be more efficient despite its simplistic modifications?
I don't think the textbook verities about sapping the will to enterprise that allegedly drives our current system would apply the way the textbook authors assume. We'd have to see the real system in action to discover its characteristic flaws and bottlenecks, and to learn what the kind of people who can under such a system approach a personal wealth of 8 million dollars do when they near that limit. Do they bleed off wealth uselessly--or do they donate it in ways that alienate it from their control but do serve a useful function? Why shouldn't a clever shop foreman, elected by her coworkers, who approaches 8 million in personal fortune spend it as fast as she gets it in ways that strengthen her firm's market position, by encouraging the rise of cheaper inputs or expanded consumer markets? Perhaps she gets bored with an easy task and shows up at some other firm offering a scheme to put them ahead for the benefit of the workers there?
Or of course she could just quit and stay home, enjoying her substantial personal fortune, which means she is out of the way and her old firm has to find someone else to take her place. If this is the pattern, we'd wind up with millions of early retirees, living off personal fortunes earned by their own work, serving as a consumer market to ballast the productive economy while others have the opportunity to learn to run a firm in their footsteps. Maybe the retired millionaires go into politics? We might wind up with something that appears to be a plutocracy but is far more democratic and populist than our OTL reality!
