Wealth & Money Quote by Charles E. Wilson

Wilson’s sentence is a corporate rebuttal dressed up as moral arithmetic: don’t ask today’s workers and producers to take a haircut so yesterday’s money can buy more. The target is deflationary thinking - the idea that falling prices are virtuous because they “reward thrift” and strengthen the value of accumulated savings. Wilson flips the frame. He’s not arguing that savings are bad; he’s arguing that making old dollars more powerful by pushing wages and prices down is a transfer, not a triumph.

The intent is practical and political. Coming out of the Depression era and into the mid-century managerial economy, business leaders had learned that mass purchasing power wasn’t a sentimental slogan; it was the operating system for consumer capitalism. If you squeeze wages or accept policies that depress demand, you don’t just punish “workmen,” you undercut the very market that current producers need to survive. Calling it an “ethical or economic” issue is strategic: ethics to shame the austerity crowd, economics to reassure the boardroom.

The subtext is a clash between two constituencies: creditors and owners of stored wealth on one side, wage earners and active enterprises on the other. “All the wealth accumulated in past years” is a pointed phrase - it lumps rentiers, bondholders, and inherited capital into a single, inert category, implicitly less deserving than the people generating value now. It’s also a defense of mild inflation (or at least resistance to deflation) as a social compromise: keep the wheel turning, even if that means old fortunes don’t gain extra leverage simply by waiting.