Of course, the demagogic, corporate-owned left will tell us that the solution to the oppression of the poor working man is to oppress the rich man as well. “Tax the rich” is the slogan of the corporate-owned left. It’s like observing that the abusive boyfriend of a woman living on the right side of the street gives his girlfriend a black eye every week from abuse, and the single mom on the left side of the street is free from that abuse, and concluding that the only “fair” solution is to get that abusive boyfriend to blacken the eye of the woman across the street every week as well.
“…when they get the money they can and will loan it directly to the stock gamblers, to be used to exploit the people.”
The author doesn’t state the mechanism of inflation clearly enough. Printing of “fiat” (not backed by a valuable commodity such as gold) money by the federal reserve.
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/on-wealth-inequality-the-left-has-a-point/
The federal government has been waging a war against the middle class and working poor since at least 1970. Wealth inequality has steadily increased since the early 1970s, and it’s not a coincidence. It’s a result of a series of policies. The government wants the masses of American working people broke, propertyless, and dependent upon elected officials for the crumbs they give back as handouts from taxes taken.
The most insidious attack on working people has been inflation, which really took off when the federal government decoupled the dollar from gold in 1971.
The inflation tax is the most regressive tax that currently exists in federal policy.
Inflation always taxes wages twice, once when the labor is performed and the worker is awaiting payment, and again when the wages are deposited into the worker’s checking account. But inflation leaves the rich man’s yacht untaxed.
No level of inflation, no matter how high, can ever take one cent of value away from a yacht. A yacht is always going to be a yacht, no matter what the value of money is.
Inflation taxes the poor man’s rent he advances to his landlord, but leaves private jets and vacation homes untaxed.
Want to know where this inflation tax goes? The stolen value of the inflation tax doesn’t just vanish out of thin air.
Some of it goes to the government; economists even have a name for the benefit government draws from the inflation tax. It’s called “seigniorage.”
Rich people generally don’t pay the inflation tax, and many of them benefit from it. Let’s say you’re a billionaire real estate mogul, not unlike Donald Trump, with a net-worth of $1 billion. You buy houses and real estate, and when you get your 20% equity, you pull that equity out and invest it into another real estate holding. So you have properties worth $5 billion, net assets of $1 billion, and (with only 20% equity in your properties) you also have $4 billion in mortgage debt.
4% inflation lowers the value of the mortgage debt you owe, since with CPI inflation you’re just going to raise the rent 4% next year. Inflation created by the Federal Reserve Bank becomes a gift of $160 million annually to your net worth ($4 billion x 0.04).
Every year.
And it enriches them more if inflation exceeds 4%, as it has in recent years.
If the CPI is 10% (as it nearly was in 2022), inflation alone adds 40% ($400 million) to this real estate mogul’s net worth. That doesn’t count the decrease in the nominal debt paid off by the real estate mogul’s tenants.
And this assumes the value of his property holdings is only increasing at the rate of CPI inflation, which it’s vastly exceeding, thanks to Federal Reserve Bank interest rate manipulation and federal housing subsidies and incentives.
Inflation enriches the real estate mogul with a boatload of mortgages that are now easier to pay off. It also benefits the hedge fund speculator and the banker, who are in the very businesses of being in debt.
In other words, the inflation tax makes the value of money flow directly from the wallets of wage-earners to the vaults of rich people who work with debt.
As long as the working man holds money in his possession, whether in the form of credit to his employer for his labor, in his pocket, or in his checking account, inflation taxes him. Only when the money is finally no longer due to him does the inflation tax end.
Be seeing you
Such an interracial coalition had emerged for a short time in conjunction with the populist movement of the late 19th century. Today, we may be witnessing the emergence of another such alliance—ironically, perhaps, on the populist right—in part because the left has largely abandoned Marxist concerns with class struggle.
Although the Civil War ended slavery, it did not end the oppression of blacks in the South, nor did Zinn believe it improved the lives of northern whites who “were not economically favored” any more than those of most Southern whites who “were poor farmers, not decisionmakers.” According to Zinn, the Civil War was a clash between “elites”—Northern industrialists versus Southern planters—not “of peoples.” He believed that various divide-and-conquer strategies in postbellum America have worked to distract poor blacks and whites from uniting against a common enemy that exploits both groups to this day.
The most famous example of the leftist shift from class to race in recent years is, of course, Robin DiAngelo’s bestseller White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (2018). This work has inspired politicians, celebrities, and other wealthy individuals to take up the cause of fighting “systemic racism” wherever it lurks, so long as it doesn’t affect their pocketbooks. Like Mills and Ciccariello-Maher, DiAngelo shows little interest in understanding or appreciating the impact of class-based injustices on white people. In a 2011 essay on white fragility that became the template for her book, she consigns the issue of class to this footnote:
MCViewPoint 