Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/9



This book is mainly a collection of addresses and papers that have previously been delivered and published. Many of them were originally published in Mining and Metallurgy. The paper on the “Distribution of Wealth in the United States” appeared first in the Iron Age. Several of the papers, however, are new.

As a collection of addresses and papers primarily prepared with no idea of republication in book-form there is naturally more or less repetition in them and a good deal of lack of coördination. If allowance be made for these faults there will be discernible, however, a certain continuity of thread and thought, which lead indeed from my earlier work on the “Wealth and Income of the American People.”

In the present papers I have made the first serious attempt to study the distribution of wealth among the classes of people in the United States, and in so doing I have been completely destructive of a fallacy that has been of powerfully harmful effect upon our public policy and will continue to be so if the exposure of it be not generally made known and recognized. The idea that about 65 per cent of the wealth of the country is owned by about 2 per cent of the people is the foundation of the principle of “soak the rich” in our system of taxation. The truth is no such thing. My constructive work on this subject is rough. I hew with an axe, but I am confident that I shape the thing correctly in a general way. Such a problem is no fit subject for meticulous work with a jig-saw.