Saving Western Civilization.

AuthorBailey, Norman A.
PositionLetter to the editor

To THE EDITOR:

In his article "Saving Capitalism" (Fall 2018), Owen Ullmann correctly diagnoses the growing wealth disparities in the United States as due primarily to the grossly skewed distribution of wealth (defined as income-producing assets). He prescribes the same solution outlined by David Smick in his recent book The Great Equalizer (PublicAffairs, 2017) on the same subject, namely, that every newborn child in the United States (presumably inhabitants who are citizens) be provided a $5,000 low-interest loan by the government to be invested in a portfolio of stock and/or bond index funds, the loan to be paid back after fifty or sixty years.

I was a member of the task force that President Ronald Reagan established to recommend methods of expanding capital ownership in the United States, which had been for years a favorite objective of the president, inspired originally by the book The Capitalist Manifesto, co-authored by Louis Kelso. The task force was chaired by William Middendorf, with Norman Kurland as vice-chair. The task force report recommended the passage of a law establishing a stock and bond equivalent of the Homesteading Act passed by Congress and signed by President Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War, and which enabled the landless...

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