Benjamin Franklin as a printer

JEFF W. writes:

The poem by the suffragist Charlotte Perkins Gilman reminded me of Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth.  Gilman complains of belonging to  subject class, of being forced to stay behind, of being “kept so small.”  This reminds me of the people who complain of being taxed in The Way to Wealth.  “Won’t these heavy Taxes quite ruin the Country?” they ask. “How shall we be ever able to pay them?”

A “plain clean old Man” replies, “We are taxed twice as much by our Idleness, three times as much by our Pride and four times as much by our Folly; and from these Taxes the Commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an Abatement.  However let us hearken to good Advice, and something may be done for us; God helps them that help themselves, as Poor Richard says, in his Almanack of 1733.”

In his humorous The Way to Wealth, Franklin focuses exclusively on individual effort; leftists always focus on their fantasies of what might be done through collective effort.

Charlotte Gilman and the world would have been better off if she had stayed away from preaching leftist fantasies and followed some of the advice in Poor Richard’s Almanack.  A word to the wise is enough, and many words won’t fill a bushel, as Poor Richard says.

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