Long Makes His Case
- Long reiterates his point that "wise men of all ages and all times, down even to the present day, have all said" the same thing he's saying now (40). Wealth must be spread around to maintain a semblance of equality in society.
- If things keep up like they are, then one person could theoretically end up owning all the money in the country.
- He breaks this down so that anyone can understand: "[n]ow, my friends, if you were off on an island where there were 100 lunches, you could not let one man eat up the hundred lunches, or take the hundred lunches and not let anybody else eat any of them. If you did, there would not be anything else for the balance of the people to consume" (43-44).
- This, says Long, is exactly what's going on right now. He states that "about ten men" own 85% of all economic activity in the U.S.—banks, steel mills, railroads, stores, mortgages, you name it.
- How can a small, independent guy be expected to start a business? The deck's stacked against him.
- (This is a bit of an exaggeration. What's shocking is how small of an exaggeration it is: in 1929, just before the crash, the top 1% of the population of America earned 25% of all income that year. It wasn't ten men, but ten thousand.)
- Long lays out more Biblical testimony in support of his attacks on these greedy parasites, and then goes back even further to Plato and Socrates of ancient Greece.
- In line 57 he states "[r]ead what Plato said; that you must not let any one man be too poor, and you must not let any one man be too rich; that the same mill that grinds out the extra rich is the mill that will grind out the extra poor, because, in order that the extra rich can become so affluent, they must necessarily take more of what ordinarily would belong to the average man."
- (He's not wrong. But he's certainly misrepresenting what Plato would call the ideal society, which he lays out in his famous Republic as a highly stratified society in which only a chosen few would benefit from the vast majority of society's resources.)
- But wait, there's more. Not only does God agree with Huey Long, not only do the most famous philosophers in Western History agree with Huey Long, but so do "Daniel Webster, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, and Theodore Roosevelt, and even as late as Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt" (62), to name a few of the most influential figures in American history.
- Y'know, no big deal. What's odd here is the inclusion of Hoover and FDR, because Long will rake them over the coals a few lines later.