The Children of Ludlow: Their Struggle is Our Struggle

Abstract

Inequality is as old as civilization itself. In every society where people have managed to produce economic surplus, leisure classes have spring up to seize that surplus and institutionalize inequality. For millennia, aristocrats sporting one pretentious title or another absconded with their subjects’ earnings without so much as a by your leave. That all changed when American colonists tossed a shipload of British tea into Boston Harbor. The American Revolution destroyed King George III’s divine right to steal. Never again would a British monarch tax Americans either with or without representation.