It”s a peculiarity of a large country that individualism is a deep-seated characteristic of the people.
The people cannot feel togetherness. They are too far from each other to feel themselves a single group and this consciousness of alienage will not let them empathize sufficiently to induce them to share the essentials of life.
Watching their fellowmen starve causes them to fear sharing the same fate and that extinguishes the sentiment of sympathy.
This attitude, widespread during an economic decline, results in a serious economic depression.
We are faced with the alternatives of actually watching our fellow people perish or sharing our money.
Many prefer watching others perish, and some do perish, but before this economic sickness destroys our nation the suffering majority force a reversal of policy and the government effects the necessary process that the people cannot bring themselves to put into effect.
By shifting the burdens of taxation to those who can best bear it, it acquires money, which it circulates by creating employment and the nation is saved.
Franklin D. Roosevelt accomplished this during our worst depression and some years ago I read of a the small country of Japan being threatened by an economic depression in consequence of which the emperor requested all the people not to save money but instead go out and spend their money.
The people complied and the Depression was thereby prevented, a consummation much to be desired by rich and poor alike.
Dean Sparks
Lucerne
