In American Conservative, author James P. Pinkerton, gave a positive review of my book on Huey Long, which I appreciate. Huey Long in the Age of Donald Trump—and Zohran Mamdani. The American Conservative. He also had an important insight into Huey’s appeal: his articulation of big ideas, and he endorsed Huey’s plan on health care as a big idea.
In his review, he lumped Huey together with current New York mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, as leftists who might kill the golden capitalist goose that lays golden eggs. Mamdani claims to be a democratic socialist. This prompts me to summarize a few observations from my book and other sources about the nature of socialism versus the features of Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth (SOW) program.
SOW proposed high taxes on the wealthy and minimum incomes and homesteads for deserving families, plus free college or vocational training for those capable of doing the work. There are other features of the program, but those are the closest to what is described as democratic socialism. The goal of democratic socialism is to have a gradual evolution to government ownership of the means (businesses) of production. Huey’s plan never contemplated this. He voted for the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority and suggested that the natural monopoly of the railroads might require government operation, but generally his program was designed to afford more equal opportunity for all to compete in a capitalist economic system.
When President Franklin Roosevelt proposed the National Industrial Recovery Act, to be run by the National Recovery Administration (NRA), its sponsor, Democratic Senator Robert Wagner of New York, stated in the senate that this was the first step toward a nationally planned economy. It set up boards staffed by business owners and union labor to set prices and production targets. It generated codes of conduct as well as prices. It was inspired by the experience of the government with the War Industries Board set up to win World War I and by the corporate state set up in Italy that helped revive its economy. While this tracks the tenets of democratic socialism, remember that many wealthy industrialists such as Bernard Baruch advocated it, and many businesses found appealing the ability to control prices, with a suspension of the antitrust laws a feature of the bill.
Huey denounced the bill as embodying all the disadvantages of socialism without any of its benefits. He opposed price fixing and the elimination of competition; opposed having government bureaucrats running businesses. Thereafter, he consistently denounced the NRA, once saying it stood for Nuts Running America. Even before the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, it was, as even Roosevelt admitted, “a mess.”
How can Huey’s program of high, confiscatory taxation of the wealthy, be squared with a description of Huey as a capitalist? Writing in the University of Chicago Law Review, DePaul College of Law Professor Greg Mark reminds us that the original capitalist theorist, Adam Smith, “was an antimonopolist …, opposed to concentrated ownership of land . . . ., [and] strongly in favor of strict control of banking.” 91 University of Chicago, Law Review, 2013, 2021. In a 1906 speech, President Theodore Roosevelt, no socialist, claimed that a system of limiting inheritances would be needed to prevent the government from being overwhelmed by the power of the wealthy. A history book of the time (circa 1930) reported a meeting in which 12 industrialists congratulated each other because collectively they controlled 90% of the industrial activity in the United States. Huey Long believed that the United States was headed toward a modern economic feudalism in which wealthy oligarchs would render everyone else peasants and serfs.
Limiting wealth acts the same way antimonopoly laws operate; it prevents one person or family, or a small group of families, from dominating the media, industry, agriculture, and politics, restricting opportunity and destroying competition, the essence of capitalism. It would be ironic if the development of capitalism today resulted in an oligarchy controlling our politics and economy when capitalism, at the time of its invention, opposed the oligarchy of the time; the theory viewed competition as the antidote to economic and political control by the wealthy or by guilds.
Limiting wealth is similar to a mandatory retirement age that many corporations and law firms enforce to make way for younger workers. Once the worker has had his or her opportunity to work and save, the opportunity ends whether their productivity has declined or not. If, then, once someone accumulated, say, one billion dollars, they have to step aside and let others work for their billion dollars, the effect is the same as a worker who reaches retirement age and has to step aside for someone else to occupy the position they used to hold. The analogy isn’t perfect, but there are commonalities.
It is interesting, too, that the National Football League has salary caps. This protects the ability of smaller market teams to compete with larger market teams. By promoting competition, the league becomes more popular, reaches more markets, makes more money, and provides a more equal opportunity for teams to compete.
Providing a free college or vocational education to qualified students also permits children of the less affluent to compete with the children of the affluent. Naturally the affluent want to provide their children the advantages of an education superior to that available to others, but the country benefits from educating every mind that is capable of learning. At a time when other foreign countries are educating more people than we are in the United States, it might be a foreign policy or national security imperative to educate every available, competent person.
Would Huey’s policies have killed the goose that lays the golden eggs? Huey believed that we were headed toward a modern feudalism that stultifies opportunity and eventually results in a stagnant economy, whereas capitalism and competition are the dynamic forces that yields the golden eggs. There are discussions to be had about the guardrails Huey or others might suggest, just as there are arguments as to what the mandatory retirement age should be (65, 70, 75?) or what the salary cap formula should be for the NFL. Setting the 100% tax on wealth too low might retard investment capability, although an adequate credit policy might ameliorate this.
Similarly, discussions would be required about a minimum income or affordable college educations. Should a minimum income be set at a sliding scale, and at what amounts? Should free educations require a minimum amount of service before or after the education is obtained?
None of those issues—about taxation of the wealthy, minimum incomes, or affordable college or vocational training—derail the ideas, however. Capitalism requires some governmental intervention, as Adam Smith contemplated, to ensure that free competition exists and that capitalism provides equal opportunity. If not Huey’s ideas, what else should be proposed to ensure that our capitalist system continues to work?
