Socialism fear prevents sustainable future
Published: April 11, 2015
While flattering, the March 29 letter to the editor by Don DeAngelis seems to credit me for establishing the public interest as the guiding principle in making federal law rather than Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote the unanimous Supreme Court decision in McCulloch vs. Maryland in 1819. Since then, laws not in the public interest passed by Congress, most egregiously by the current one, have been by definition unconstitutional.
French economist Thomas Pikettys recent book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, charts the rise of the United States to its present position as the most economically unjust society in world history, and projects the trend to the year 2100, when even the most socialist country today, Sweden, will be drastically undermined by inherited wealth.
Piketty sees no alternative but a return to the progressive and, in extreme cases, confiscatory taxation of the 1950s made possible by two world wars and the Great Depression, events that temporarily suppressed the otherwise unrestrained growth of capitalism over centuries. Throughout this period, the assets of the bottom half of society in every nation have remained at little more than zero.
Along with the domestic problems found every day in the Observer-Reporter, international ones like too much carbon in the atmosphere and the mass extinctions of species are at root political, and the fundamental obstacle to the holistic approach favored by researcher Wolfgang Sachs in planning for a sustainable future is American fear and ignorance of socialism.
Jim Greenwood
Washington
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Socialism fear prevents sustainable future