The 1892 Hatch Bill fight was over speculation’s moral legitimacy, not taxation

Evidence

In Gilded Age Chicago, the speculative imagination of “markets” such as the CBOT’s futures traders battled against the speculative imagination of “publics” (the broader classes of lay speculators and bucket-shop punters). We can see this fight most clearly in the 1892 Hatch Bill—a flat tax proposal of 10 percent on futures trading that nearly posed an existential threat to the CBOT’s activities. What at first sight appeared to be a fight over taxation was in fact a turning point in the conflict about the moral legitimacy of speculation itself. … By contrast, the CBOT and other formal exchanges argued, the “undisciplined” speculative imagination of the shadow economy made markets susceptible to panic, and it was therefore morally repugnant. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 125

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the Frankfurt School material on how ‘uneducated masses’ are pathologized to justify elite discipline — connects to the reader’s earlier reading on authority and class.