Tweet [1]
… is from page 552 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality [2]; specifically, it’s a note drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University; (I can find no date for this passage):
The working class have much more to lose by an inquiry to capital than the capitalist. They are more interested in its security. Because what threatens the one with loss of luxury and superfluity, threatens the other with the loss of necessity.
DBx: This insight is deeply important, although it’s lost on so very many people, both left and right.
Indeed, the point is even stronger than Acton seems to have realized. Taxes leveled on ‘rich’ capitalists likely cause them to reduce their consumption of luxuries even less than such taxes cause these capitalists to reduce their investments. And when capitalists reduce their investments, the amount and quality of capital – tools – that workers work with falls, thus causing workers’ productivity to fall, thus causing workers’ wages to fall, thus causing workers’ standards of living to fall.