Kevin Graham wrote:“The experience of mankind has shown that the people of communities and nations among whom wealth is the most equally distributed, enjoy the largest degree of liberty, are the least exposed to tyranny and oppression and suffer the least from luxurious habits which beget vice. Under such a system, carefully maintained there could be no great aggregations of either real or personal property in the hands of a few; especially so while the laws, forbidding the taking of usury or interest for money or property loaned, continued in force.
One of the great evils with which our own nation is menaced at the present time is the wonderful growth of wealth in the hands of a comparatively few individuals. The very liberties for which our fathers contended so steadfastly and courageously, and which they bequeathed to us as a priceless legacy, are endangered by the monstrous power which this accumulation of wealth gives to a few individuals and a few powerful corporations. By its seductive influence results are accomplished which, were it more equally distributed, would be impossible under our form of government. It threatens to give shape to the legislation, both State, and National, of the entire country. If this evil should not be checked, and measures not taken to prevent the continued enormous growth of riches among the class already rich, and the painful increase of destitution and want among the poor, the nation is likely to be overtaken by disaster; for, according to history, such a tendency among nations once powerful was the sure precursor of ruin.”
- Brigham Young, Daniel H. Wells, Wilford Woodruff, Orson Pratt, Lorenzo Snow, Franklin D. Richards, Brigham Young Jr., George A. Smith, John taylor, Orson Hyde, Charles C,. Rich, Erastus Snow, George Q. Cannon, Albert Carrington, 1875
Interesting, and there is no doubt that there are arguments to be made for concern about the vast concentration of wealth in few private hands (the most egregious being the concentration of wealth within the leftist foundations - Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie etc., and grant giving money laundering operations like The Tides Foundation), but that concern is with its use, not the concentration itself, which is beyond the reach of any government that has not descended to police state level, the level Kevin Graham finds so attractive.
None of this, however, is LDS doctrine, and outside of a few obscure statements of general consensus of a very broad nature by a group of General Authorities, there has been no consistent talk of this kind from the Brethren for almost two centuries, and none whatever in the 20th.
The extreme vagueness is one red flag as to taking this to be in any way indicative of anything binding on the Saints as doctrinal. Secondly, whatever these particular men might have been thinking at the time, large concentrations of wealth in private hands only becomes a serious concern of any magnitude when government becomes invested with vast concentrations of power.
Of
far greater concern than such concentrations of wealth in private hands, which in the vast majority of cases has been produced through the serving of other human beings by providing goods and services they want, of their own free will, to trade some of their property to acquire in an uncoerced contractual agreement, is the vast concentration of ever larger quantities of national monetary wealth - wealth that would otherwise remain in the productive private sector as productive capital - in government, a vast institution of monopolistic force and coercion that can only exit parasitically upon the productive activities of the non-governmental sector.
A rogue state, as we now have in the United States and which is presently sending Europe into the abyss, can destroy any business, or body of businesses, at any time (coal, for example), and there is nothing business, no matter how big, can do about it, if this is the desire and intention. If they're lucky, they will enter into a
quid pro quo with their executioners and survive as quasi-creatures of the state (the entire "green" energy sector, for example). Or, they can become funders, as countless major corporations have done, of those who seek their destruction (as the really vast corporate funding of the environmental movement, including its most radical elements, demonstrates), seeking to buy time and buy off the hyenas circling their prey.
Whatever Brigham Young may have believed, and whatever his personal opinions economically, we know socialism does not -and cannot - work. There are more than a hundred million bodies buried all around us lying mute testament to that historical reality, as well as numerous raped economies, corrupted societies, and entire continents economically and socially devastated by the crackpot theories of Karl Marx and his utopian gnostic priesthood, pathetic, servile remnants of which exist to this very day.