The Freeman 1972 - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

)WE-kL-T-H? •HENRY HAZLITTFROM TIME IMMEMORIAL therehave been reformers who demandedthat wealth and income shouldbe "divided equally" - or at leastdivided with less glaring inequalitiesthan the reformers sawaround them.These demands have never beenmore insistent than they are toda.y.Yet most of them are based, in thefirst place, on a completely erroneousidea of the extent to whichpresent wealth or income in theUnited States is "maldistributed."An American socialist, Daniel DeLeon, announced in a celebratedspeech in 1905 that, on the average,.the owners of American industrygrabbed off 80 per cent ofthe wealth produced in their factories,while the workers got· onlyHenry Hazlitt is well known to FREEMANreaders as author, columnist, editor, lecturer,and practitioner of freedom. This article willappear as a chapter in a forthcoming book,The Conquest of Poverty, to be published byArlington House.20 per cent.! His contention wa.swidely accepted and· exerted greatinfluence.Yet the truth, as we have seenin the article on "The Distributionof Income" (the Freeman,October, 1971), is exactly the· opposite.Labor in America is gettingthe lion's share of the na.­tion's output. In recent years theemployees of the country's corporationshave been getting morethan seven-eighths of the corporateincome available for division,and the shareowners less than aneighth. More than 70 per cent ofthe personal income in the nationin 1970 was received in the formof wages and salaries. Businessand professional income totaledless than 7 per cent, interest paymentsonly 8 per cent, and dividendsonly 3 per cent.The truth seems to be that per-1 See Howard E. Kershner, Dividing theWealth (Devin-Adair, 1971), pp. 17-24.100