Wealth & Money Quote by Carter G. Woodson

Woodson smuggles a radical democratic claim into the dry language of taxation. Start with the first move: “the consumer pays the tax.” That’s an argument about incidence, not legislation. He’s insisting that costs don’t stay politely on corporate ledgers or in government ledgers; they travel downhill into prices and rent and daily life. In a segregated economy where Black Americans were routinely positioned as captive consumers - barred from many jobs yet forced to buy from hostile markets - the point lands as more than economics. It’s about who quietly bankrolls the state while being denied the state’s promised returns.

Then Woodson pivots from the pocketbook to a moral demand: “every individual of the social order should be given unlimited opportunity to make the most of himself.” The subtext is a rebuke to the era’s favorite alibi: that unequal outcomes reflect unequal “fitness.” If everyone is paying into the system, everyone is owed a real shot within it. “Unlimited opportunity” isn’t a feel-good slogan; it’s a pressure test for American liberalism. If the consumer underwrites public life, public life has to stop rationing education, mobility, and dignity by race and class.

As a historian of Black life and the architect of Black History Week, Woodson understood how exclusion works: not just through violence or law, but through narratives that make exclusion seem natural. This sentence tries to break that spell. It ties fiscal reality to civic obligation, making inequality look less like fate and more like breach of contract.