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into few hands are enormous. Kevin Phillips, a conservative Republican columnist, whose 1990 book,
The Politics of Rich and Poor
, is a bible on this theme, aptly sums up the effect upon our nation of this growing accumulation of wealth at the top:
    It is not enough to describe the United States as the world’s richest nation between 1945 and 1989. The distribution of its wealth conveys a more provocative message. By several measurements, the United States in the late twentieth century led all other major industrial countries in the gap dividing the upper fifth of the population from the lower—in the disparity between top and bottom.
    Several observations should be quickly made. The conspicuous fortunes like the Rockefellers’, the Fords’, the Carnegies’ and the Dewitt Wallaces’ have been converted into great trusts whoseyearly interest on their investments is applied to the public good. The money has not been wasted, and many other families in this elite group have established their own foundations with equally commendable purposes but with smaller initial funding. Unfortunately, other possessors of large fortunes have been social parasites, contributing little but their income taxes, while still others—the bill Gateses and the Paul Allens, for example—have so recently emerged that we cannot guess what directions they will take when their period of accumulation has ended.
    From time to time I shall consider historical precedents that throw light upon our situation, and few of these will be more illustrative than an overview of what happened in several earlier societies when the ownership of wealth became dangerously un-balanced. One such period, when stupendous fortunes were concentrated in a few hands, occurred in the medieval era when all Europe and some of northern Africa was unified in one dominant religion. The Catholic Church proliferated with its Roman and Orthodox branches and was extremely wealthy. To increase its riches the Church’s officials paid special attention to older men and women of wealth, especially well-to-do widows. As these Christians approached death the Church applied heavy pressure on them to will to the Church their money, their art holdings and especially the vast lands they had acquired.
    Many of these wealthy old patrons succumbed to the Church’s blandishments and willed all their holdings to the nearby monasteries or convents, so that over time the religious orders became the custodians of a large percentage of the society’s wealth. This transfer of money, art and material wealth other than land did little damage to the general economy, but it did create envy and animosity among the kings, nobles and lesser rulers, who saw that what might otherwise have come to them had instead been acquired by the Church.
    Real harm to the general welfare of the countryside did occur, however, with the transfer of land to the Church because it withdrew huge tracts from the peasants who had fed their families from crops grown on land they had for generations considered their own. Even though they had not owned the land, they felt themselves entitled to continued occupancy. Once the lands came under the control of the Church, however, the peasants learned they would no longer be allowed to control any of the produce of the lands they tilled. All produce entered the marketplace under the ownership of the Church, which grew richer while the poor grew poorer.
    This appallingly negative process became known as
Le Mortmain de l’Église
, the dead hand of the Church. By retaining both the land and all of its produce for its own profit, the Church disrupted the traditional customs of merchandising. It converted the once semifree peasants into serfs, who now had to buy the produce they themselves had raised. Some trivial economic benefit did result from this transfer of land to the Church, for monks proved to be able custodians, but the benefits were far less than what a diligent peasantry