"Communism is a hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government: but the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil, which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the citadel of rule.
He mocks the people who proposes that the Government shall protect the rich and that they in turn will care for the laboring poor. Any intermediary between the people and their Government or the least delegation of the care and protection the Government owes to the humblest citizen in the land makes the boast of free institutions a glittering delusion and the pretended boon of American citizenship a shameless imposition."
First of all, no one could ever accuse President Cleveland of being the poster boy for socialism in any form.
What President Cleveland was addressing in the first part of his message to Congress (of which the above statement is part), was the American tariff system, which until the Sixteenth Amendment was the primary source of income for the Federal Government. In 1888, the system emphasized tariffs on less expensive goods from Europe--in order to "protect" American Markets (more often to permit price gouging of America's poor and middle class by America's capitalists)--while exempting from tariffs items like silk, ivory, etc., which only the rich could afford, because America did not produce these items.
The tariff system as it existed in 1888 was a very regressive system of taxation, deriving the majority of its income from the goods most needed and most used by America's poor and middle class, while exempting items which were used primarily or solely by the rich. This is very similar to the effect of today's Social Security tax, which is levied only against the first $110,000 of an individual's wages or salary. Anything above that amount is exempt. This means that the bottom 85% of the working population have to pay 4.2 percent (at least for the next two years, 6.2 percent afterwards) of their income to Social Security, while the top 15% have to pay an ever smaller percentage in relation to their total income that is subject to this tax.
President Cleveland expressed my feelings on this matter earlier in his 1888 Message to Congress:
"This is not equality before the law.
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