Robert Reich: The ‘Founding Fathers Did Not Want A Privileged Aristocracy’

[Purveyor]

At a time of historic economic inequality, it should be a no-brainer to raise a tax on inherited wealth for the very rich. Yet there’s a move among some members of Congress to abolish it altogether.

If you’re as horrified at the prospect of abolishing the estate tax as I am, I hope you’ll watch and share the accompanying video.

Today the estate tax reaches only the richest two-tenths of one percent, and applies only to dollars in excess of $10.86 million for married couples or $5.43 million for individuals.

That means if a couple leaves to their heirs $10,860,001, they now pay the estate tax on $1. The current estate tax rate is 40%, so that would be 40 cents.

Yet according to these members of Congress, that’s still too much.

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more...

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/06/robert-reich-the-founding-fathers-did-not-want-a-privileged-aristocracy/

[malthaussen]

1. Oh, come on, Mr Reich.

The Founding Fathers were a privileged aristocracy.

-- Mal

[exboyfil]

3. Robert Reich obviously needs to read

Howard Zinn. White land owning males. No one else need apply. Even the best of the founding fathers would blow a circuit if he saw who was occupying the Oval Office today.

We have a large contingent that wants to canonize the founding fathers. They were incredible men, but products of their age.

[malthaussen]

4. Normally, I think Mr Reich makes decent points...

... if I sometimes wonder what took him so long to have his epiphanies. But anyone with a nodding acquaintance with 18th century history would be rolling on the floor at this one.

-- Mal

[Cal33]

6. The Founding Fathers did make sure that there would be no royalty and aristocracy

in the US. Reich was right about that part. But today, the corporate business people
are doing what they can to bring them back again -- but they will be calling them by
different names, of course. They know how to keep the people fooled.

[malthaussen]

7. A titled aristocracy is hardly the only kind.

And many of our aristocrats wound up with titles, anyway. After all, lawyers have appropriated "esquire" in the US. And militia rank was always a good way to show who was who in the county aristocracy.

But my own interpretation of the "intent of the Founders" is that they would have been appalled that the door was opened even a crack for those not of "the right people" to hold any substantive power.

-- Mal

[Jester Messiah]

5. Seriously. [nt]

[D Gary Grady]

8. It depends on how your define "aristocracy"

"Aristocracy" usually refers to a system of inherited privilege, and while most (not all) of the Founders were indeed wealthy white men from well-to-do families, a significant number were self-made. Benjamin Franklin, for example, didn't come from a poor background by any means, but he fled indentured servitude and reached Philadelphia with very little, and we worked hard for his later wealth. That might help explain why he opposed, indeed ridiculed, the property requirement for voting. Of course, there were lots of Founders on the other side. John Adams argued that enlarging the electorate would amount to mob rule. The Founders did not all think alike.

But it is true that the Founders pretty generally opposed aristocracy in the inherited sense. The Declaration's assertion that "all men are created equal" meant exactly that -- one might indeed be born into wealth or other advantages, but that did not imply a greater innate worth as a human being. In context, Reich is saying that the Founders opposed a system that allowed power to accumulate by inheritance, not that the Founders hated the rich. That's probably a simplification, but so is labeling the Founders "a privileged aristocracy."

[riversedge]

2. yet, it has been brewing for years.