LAD #17: Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth

In Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth, the scottish-born millionare talked about how the rich should behave and how their wealth should be taken care of.

First of all, Carnegie believed that it would benefit the society more if some of the people were wealthy and others were not. Carnegie believed that in order for society to evolve, their needed to be a higher class of rich people in order to benefit the growth of society. He believed that to have a small percent of the population be rich would be better than having the entire population be poor.

Carnegie also believed that the rich people in society needed to distribute their money in some kind of way. He stated that this could be done in three ways. The first way was to distribute the money to your heirs when you died, in order to keep the money in the family. Carnegie didn't support this method because he believed that this would not help the greater good of society. Carnegie also believed that the burden of controlling all of that money should not be placed on the heirs of the deceased. The second way that Carnegie believed money could be distributed was it would be given away after the millionaire has died. He believed that they should give it away during their lifetime, which was his third method.

Carnegie also believed in a public death tax, which would tax the deceased wealth after they died. Carnegie liked this method because it would make sure that the money would go towards public funds such as building libraries and other buildings that everyone could use. he believed that was more effective than giving out small sums to every family, since the buildings would be there for hundreds of years.