AMERICAN BUSINESS
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counts (which have expanded into a major racket) and trust funds–
that boost the total figures as much as several hundred percent.
I am aware that the income tax takes a big slice of the personal
incomes. That fact, however, seems to give less, rather than more
excuse, for adding more hundreds of thousands in the upper brackets
where only 15% or so is left. Besides, there are ways-expense ac–
counts, capital gains, farms worked at a loss, pensions, tax-exempt
securities, stream-lined gifts--for softening the edge of the income
tax. I am aware also that most of the arguments of the labor leaders
and their "labor economists" about corporate profits are the grossest
demagogy (as if, in an economy like ours, wage-increases could "come
out of profits" rather than be added to the cost base, as if in any
case the spread of profits over the wages of all the workers would
make in the long run any appreciable difference, other than to en–
sure an increased number of bankruptcies . . . ). I also know that
profits in the hundreds of millions can always be shown to be "very
small" by altering the base to be used in calculating them: "total
turnover" instead of invested capital; reproduction cost instead of or–
iginal cost; profit per unit instead of total profit- the "business eco–
nomists" are just as ingenious as the labor economists.
All these pseudo-economic rationalizations are beside today's
point. That point is that these monstrous incomes and profits have an
antagonizing and demoralizing effect upon the workers, and the rest
of the poorly or normally paid members of society, in this country and
throughout the world. These income statistics are emotional explosives
handed gratuitously to the communist propaganda machine.
Even where they do not lead to conscious communist tendencies,
they promote that "alienation of the proletariat" which Marx rightly
believed to be so essential a condition for the victory of communism.
They also, in themselves and by their psychological effect of justify–
ing the most extreme trade union demands, stimulate inflationary
processes and economic disharmony. Objectively considered, their
direct economic impact is comparatively slight. Nevertheless, in the
present condition of the world, their psychological, political and social
impact is enormous. In a world where there is not only so much pover–
ty and misery, but where more men than ever before are conscious
of that misery, they call forth a moral rejection of the system that
permits a few to be so blatantly and self-indulgently greedy.
