Askov American. [volume] (Askov, Pine County, Minn.) 1914-current, 1935-03-14
THE ABOLITION OF POVERTY


Editor Askov American:
The major social crime is poverty.
1t is a blighting enslavement. Every
human being without money is in
truth, a slave In a land Of theoret-
ical freedmen, the prevalence Of de-
grading penury Is mOnstrouS In
Justice.
Just what is slavery? Perhaps we
can find its exact definition in the
following, which Proudhon gave us
Slavery is murder. The power to
take from a human being his thought.
his will. and his personality, Is a
power of life and death. To enslaye
a man is to kill him."
To deny a human being a perman-
ent income is subjecting him to an
economic thralldom that is a life
long, living death. 1t constitutes the
most heinous of all murder. And to-
day nearly 40 per cent Of our citi-
zenry is below the poverty line.
Oh. 'the long, long patience Of the
plundered poor" Again our poet
laureate, Edwin Markham, articulates
the economic crucifixion of the race.
Its ages-old and colossal injustice he
exposed in an earlier poem. 1.-THE Man
With the Hoe" but as yet our peO-
pie have not called to the tribunal Of
justice-the perpetrators and engi-
neers of poverty.
Or realized that the imposition Of
restitution is a bestial failure Of
avaricious and ruthless cyclists to
abide by the doctrine of "the right
to life" guaranteed all Americans.
Who are those who blow out the
light within our brains?"-"who slant
back the brow,"-who silence the
song, the dream, within our soul?"
Lunatics,-who withhold from man
the right to a job, whereby to earn
the money to live. Mono-maniacs,
whose dementia is the initiation Of
self-love and the power of the in
toxicating omnipOtence they exper-
fenced in the prenatal stage. Self
appointed gods. who take everything
they can sieze, and who return moth
ing to the environment. Lunatics.
And we permit those psychopaths
to cruelty the many so that they may
rule. We permit the magnificatiOn
of greed to distort all that is really
human and to apotheosize the destruc-
tive instincts of the desert jacbal. the
hyena, and the jungle python From
the dim dawn of the ethno-centric
bandit to the money emperor, man
kind has been brutalized and dehu-
manized until today the great mass
of humanity lives and dies in the
living death OF poverty.
How has so ubiquitous and never
ending slavery been possible?
Through an economic system that
considers profits before human well
fare; that enjoins a disc of silver or
gold metal and an oblong of green
paper as necessary before the neces-
saries of life can be procured, and
who steal the gold and silver from
mines that the Creator intended for
all earth's inhabitants. In other
words the self-centered and crack
Drained egotist predominantly anti
social and grossly homeopathic, is
the modern autocrat whose throne Is
set on the bony shoulders of poverty
shackled peoples.
Gold. silver and green paper is not
wealth. Labor is wealth. 1t comes
always before the secondary import
ance. which IS capital. The work Of
hand. brain. heart and soul Is the
true wealth Gold and silver discs
cannot create violet or a Fifth Sym
phony. Yet the cruelist power Of
money is its ability to buy what it
cannot create.
Who made gold and silver? The
neutrality-suspicious.?
Place any money Croesus in the
heart of barren plain and ask him
to create gold and silver. Could he
duplicate the work Of Nature in so
much as the creation of a single grain
of either metal? Who made the
metals in the first place? Surely not
the modern Midas's whose billions
could lift the centuries-old curse Of
poverty from the back of all human
ity. Then why have they the power
of its control and the concomitant
power of life and death over the mass
of humanity?
Ask these self-constituted lords who
gorge in every material luxury. while
millions are caught on the tenter-
hooks of moneylessness.-to create a
single beneficial invention for the
race or the sunshine without which.
even they might be blotted out Ask
them to make the oil. the coal the
lumber. the wheat. the herds. the oxy-
gen. the human breathing apparatus.