Social decency, most Americans
today would agree, demands a minimum wage, a floor that keeps working
people out of dire privation. Does social decency also demand a “maximum
wage,” an income ceiling that discourages wealth from dangerously
concentrating?
Philosopher Felix
Adler certainly thought so. We remember Adler today as the tireless
reformer who led the national effort to end child labor in the early
1900s. Adler also founded the Ethical Culture movement and introduced
the kindergarten concept into American education. Much less well known:
Adler advanced America’s first serious maximum wage proposal.
The
exploitation of workers young and old, Adler believed, generated grand
private fortunes that exerted a “corrupting influence” on American
politics. To curb that corruption, he proposed a steeply graduated
income tax — with a 100 percent top rate at the point “when a certain
high and abundant sum has been reached, amply sufficient for all the
comforts and true refinements of life.”
This
100 percent top rate, Adler told a packed 1880 lecture hall in New York
City, would leave with the wealthy individual “all that he
can truly use for the humane purposes of life” and tax away “only that
which is to him merely a means of pomp and pride and power.” READ MORE
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