Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/156



The spreading of the farmer-labor movement in the West and the ascendancy of Senator LaFollette and Senator Brookhart and others like them foreshadow attacks upon the corporations and wealthy persons of the United States in the next session of Congress. James A. Frear, a member of Congress from Wisconsin, stated the underlying idea in a recent newspaper interview, wherein he was represented as saying the following:

“Undistributed and unlimited profiteering has brought about an unhealthy economic condition when 2 per cent of the people in this country are found to own 65 per cent of all the wealth… Millions of people who are scraping out a bare existence and fighting against a vicious sales tax urged by big business will approve any effort to curb these unconscionable profits.”

I do not criticize Mr. Frear, or any of the so-called radical senators, for entertaining the belief that 65 per cent-of the wealth of the United States is owned by 2 per cent of the people, for their belief is founded upon what appears to be good authority and is entertained by more scholarly persons than they. Prof. Homer Hoyt in the quarterly of the American Statistical