Liberal Economists
By Charles Tolleson
April 15, 2011

Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, a critic of free markets, is promoting a tax on the rich because he says the divide between rich and poor is increasing. He says the poor are struggling more.

Stiglitz should have been around in 1900 when there were only an estimated 4000 millionaires in the United States. A million dollars in 1900 would equal about 22 million dollars adjusted for inflation. This was just a fraction of 1% of the 76 million people in the U.S. at that time. There were 7 million millionaires in the United States in 2009 in a population of slightly over 300 million. This dramatic increase in millionaires is proof that capitalism creates wealth for more people. Countries that do not allow capitalism, free markets, and private property have fewer millionaires and more poor people who are poorer than the poor people of capitalist countries.

Today the United States has 412 BILLIONAIRS, 34% of the world’s total billionaires. The billionaires all have large staffs that are employed. They have corporate jet crews that are well paid. They have yacht crews that are well paid. They pay high property taxes on their houses, planes, and yachts. Take away their money, as Stilitiz and leftists propose, and give it to the government mob and what will they do with it? They will pay themselves a large commission and use the rest to buy votes and the poor will become poorer.

As for poor people struggling more than in the past, Stiglitz should have been around as a poor American in 1900 to see poor people really struggle. Those same poor classes now have free medical care, free housing, and free food. They also have TVs and cell phones. They have instant heat and running water. To know what a real struggle is Stiglitz should try drawing water from a well, building a fire in a wood burning stove for cooking, doing laundry in a tub, plowing behind two mules, and using an unheated outhouse on a cold winter night.

I have a picture of me with my brother and sister taken around 1940. My sister is wearing shoes. My brother and I are bare foot, as were most children of the time. Poor people of that time could not afford shoes for their children so the children only wore shoes when it was too cold to go barefoot. Today poor people wear stylish Nike shoes while humanitarians like Stiglitz say poor people are struggling. The following picture shows some barefoot boys doing factory work in 1912. They were struggling. Poor people today do not struggle like those poor people in 1912.




Poor people in 1900 made about $1.60 per day which would be about $35 today in inflation adjusted dollars. A poor person today makes a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, or about $58 dollars per day for a shorter day than a poor person worked in 1900 for about $35 per day.

“Internal Revenue Service data show that the income of people who were in the lowest income tax bracket in 1996 rose by 91 percent by 2005. But people in the "top one percent" had their incomes drop by 26 percent in those same years. There is nothing complicated about this. Most people simply start at the bottom when they are young and their pay rises as they get more experience. Most people in the top one percent are there for only a single year when they happen to have a spike in income. They too are not an enduring class.”- Thomas Sowell

People like Stiglitz will never be satisfied no matter how much is confiscated from the producers and given to the non producers.

“Leftists, in their heart of hearts, hate capitalism more than they fear the total state. They can put up with anything so long as people are not free to make as much money as they want in the service of others. The resulting inequality in wealth distribution in this system, and the manner in which the free society raises up a class of natural aristocrats, is morally intolerable to them. They prefer to risk the creation of the totalitarian society rather than put their core hatreds on the back burner.” Lew Rockwell