LAD #21: The Gospel of Wealth

Andrew Carnegie addresses the benefits of a seemingly unbalanced system of Big Business within a capitalist America in his "Gospel of Wealth." Carnegie acknowledges the increasing gap between the poor, unskilled workers and the prosperous industrialists such as himself as a fundamental component to a growing society, downplaying his title as a corrupt robberbaron. He then goes on to offer solutions for the promotion of a distribution resources among the wealthy and to improve the administrations that would monitor this in order to ensure the prosperity of the human beings around him during his lifetime. First addressing the European policy of primogeniture, he says that the limited cash-flow that this encourages is rather nullified by the reality that iot is narrow-minded, limiting the guaranteed passage of a father's wealth to his first born son, thus disturbing and probing conflict in regards to a constant competence among individuals within a state due to deprivation of money. Carnegie subsequently addresses that after a man's death, death taxes should be placed on his estate and tangibles so that his wealth is not wasted on another generation but rather redistributed among the public. Ultimately, Carnegie argues that men should not hoard their money, but rather invest it in development and infrastructure to aid those less fortunate, a virtue that he upheld through his support of libraries and the establishment of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, with Carnegie-Mellon bearing his name.