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.”

The New York Times would give Felix Adler’s call for an income maximum widespread circulation, but the notion of a maximum wage wouldn’t take a specific legislative form until World War I, when progressives demanded a 100 percent tax on all income over $100,000 to help finance the war effort.

The group backing this $100,000 income limit, the American Committee on War Finance. would assemble a network of 2,000 volunteers and publish clip-out ads in daily newspapers across the country that readers could sign to “pledge” their support.

Americans who signed the Committee pledge were committing themselves “to further the prompt enactment into law” of the boldest tax-the-rich proposal any American political grouping had ever promoted. They were demanding a fixed limit on income, what the Committee would call “a conscription of wealth.”

“If the government has a right to confiscate one man's life for public purposes,” Committee on War Finance chairman Amos Pinchot, a progressive New York attorney, declared, “it certainly ought to have the right to confiscate another man's wealth for the same purposes.”

The richest 2 percent of Americans, Pinchot would testify to Congress, owned an incredible 65 percent of America’s wealth.

“Neither the United States nor any other country can carry on a war which will make the world safe for democracy and the plutocracy at the same time,” Pinchot would note to lawmakers. “If the war is to serve God, it cannot serve Mammon.”

Amos Pinchot and his fellow progressives would not, in the end, win the 100 percent top tax rate they were seeking. But by war’s end their campaign had totally changed the tenor of America’s political discourse on taxes. The nation’s top tax rate on income over $1 million, just 7 percent in 1914, would hurdle to 77 percent in 1918.

The “Red Scare” that followed World War I in the United States would quickly dash progressive hopes for a more egalitarian America — and usher in a right-wing political reaction that once again made America safe for plutocracy. Incomes and wealth would concentrate at a ferocious pace, and top Democrats and Republicans alike would push throughout the 1920s for lower taxes on America’s richest. By 1925, no dollar of income over $100,000 would face more than a 25 percent tax rate.

read the rest at http://poorrichards-blog.blogspot.com/2012/02/with-runaway-greed-infecting-corporate.html

Why not just make the wages of every job $50,000/yr
That would be "fair"

Food for thought for sure. I would take a pay cut and it would be worth it to know that my kids could make a fair liveing.

Child labor is sometimes a good thing. In every country where we shut down our "sweatshops", child prostitution goes up. You see, the families are very poor and everyone has to work to eat. If a kid can't make money in a sweatshop, he/she has to earn a living somewhere.

As one Indian sweatshop employee said of sweatshops "Of course we sweat! This is India, everyone sweats! Now leave us alone and let us work!"

No one is talking about sweatshops please start another thread for that,

It's in your original post...



Sweatshop is the term activists and media types use to describe factories where children work in 3rd world countries.

no it was child labor

the problem is greed

back in the 20s the company was greedy and did not pay a fair wage

now the unions are greedy and price themselves out of work

if you need more pay and get it -- the price of your product increases

thus

fewer customers

how can a worker making 25,000 buy a product that costs 200,000 cause construction unions raise the price of labor and goods unions raise the price of materials

same for auto workers

then you have the greedy oil companies that raise prices on a whim and a maybe --- fuel is going up again -- can anyone say -- so much for any upsurge in the economy -- the oil company is sucking up any disposable income again -- so much for buying anything else if you want fuel to keep warm or go from a to b

..a sweat shop IS child labor.

>.>

I see you have sold into the anti union line regardless of the fact that every union has been makeing consessions for decades. For a while we were the only group keeping up with inflation, god forbid anyone should do that. I read somewere that if the minimum wage had kept up with inflation it would be about 15 bucks an hour and that sounds about right being anyone I know who makes fifteen bucks an hour lives like a minimum wage worker of the late 70's.

Oh for gods sake google both terms

..ok?

...and?

child labor
n.
The full-time employment of children who are under a minimum legal age.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/child+labor

sweat shop
A shop or factory in which employees work long hours at low wages under poor conditions.




Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/sweatshop#ixzz1lwLgSmDN

OK class over, what have we learned? the two are not the same.

Can a child work in a sweat shop yes.
Can a child work in a non sweat shop and would it still be child labor? Yes

Goodnight

...yeah, still didn't make a point.

Children working in either situation is still illegal.
He chose a specific one and proclaim they are 'entirely' different.

So, keep laughing.

*shrugg*

Don't bother me none.

Especially, when you proved the point for us.

>.>

...yeah, still didn't make a point.

Children working in either situation is still illegal.
He chose a specific one and proclaim they are 'entirely' different.

So, keep laughing.

*shrugg*

Don't bother me none.

Especially, when you proved the point for us.

>.>

There is this thing called the "Law on Unintended Consequences".

Example: Sweatshops close, child prostitution goes up as a result.

Example 2: The USA institutes minimum wage laws, minority youth unemployment goes up as a result.

One persons unintended consequences aren't that big of a deal, but when it's a governments unintended consequences, it's devastating. We should never forget that "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions"

Well then what would be the incentive to work in construction when you could make the same flipping burgers?

...and what's the present incentive to be a nurse, when so many less important jobs make two-three times as much?

It's called passion.

Nursing is a well paid career and it's portable. You can be a nurse anywhere. I was looking at job openings in the Caribbean and they are looking for nurses all over the place.

But ignoring that, your rate of pay is typically equal to the value of the service. So if a job pays 2 or 3 times more than a nurse makes, somebody must value that service.

Oh the conservative mindset....The topic realy is about a cap on insane pay to those who have devesated america with their incompetence and greed, at least in the last depression the basterds jumped off the buildings now that they own the political system they get bailed out.

The article states verry well how when wealth is concentrated it corrupts politics, with all those tax breaks the 1% have recieved rather than re invest in america have simply gobbled up the media and politicians and with the non stop propaganda has turned many americans into shrills for their points of view, scroll up and y ou will find poor people argueing the case for the 1%.

Its no small wonder this country is going down the tubes.