Most Americans don’t consider income inequality to be a serious issue. They may occasionally be pissed off at the “bankers” and “Wall Street” barons, but it is hardly ever a categorical disgust with the wealth and power of the top 1% or 0.5% of Americans. It is even more ironic that Republicans so often bring up the red herring of “class warfare” whenever Democrats discuss proportional taxation. If anything, the rich are far more classist and politically conscious than the heterogeneous middle and lower classes.

That is what has made them so inconspicuously successful at amassing their wealth and power.

The problem with wealth is not the having of it; it is the abuse that follows. Most Americans are vaguely uncomfortable with the existing political system. They would be outraged if they realized that elections are bought and sold by the ever increasing millions spent by the rich and corporations to influence elections and to influence elected officials after the polls close (see Building support for a 28th Amendment for more on this subject).

Most Americans are vaguely uncomfortable with corporate salaries and oversight. They would be furious if they realized how corporate compensation has grown out of all proportion to corporate profits, which is little more than outright theft from shareholders, and how these compensation plans are voted on by Boards of Directors which are incestuously intermingled by an Old Boys and Gals network of CEOs.

Most Americans are enthusiastic supporters of funding for education and concerned with the rising cost of higher education. They would be disgusted by the blatant exclusivity of some of America’s top institutions of higher learning, where tuition is used as a barrier to exclude “the wrong sort of people” and admission criteria disproportionately favor the children of wealthy alumni at the expense of equally or more gifted “outsiders”.

The Republicans would, of course, hysterically scream “class warfare” at the very thought of what I’m proposing. They would also claim that taxing the rich is tantamount to economic suicide, since the rich are the “job creating” class. They are wrong, knowingly wrong, on both counts. The history of the XIXth and XXth centuries is one of growing political empowerment and share of wealth for the poorest classes. It was the peaceful “bourgeois” revolutions of the late XIXth century that broke the grip of monarchy and aristocracy across much of Europe, without bloodshed.

The fact that there was strong economic growth AND greater equality of income makes rubbish of the arguments that you need income or wealth inequality to generate new jobs or economic growth. In fact, the opposite is true – extractive plutocracies are almost always net destroyers of national wealth. It was precisely those nations that clung to their grotesquely inequitable systems – Russia, Spain, Austria-Hungary, Imperial Germany – that saw the greatest social instability and the most violent outbreaks of class warfare.

We are dangerously close to following in their footsteps.

Topics:

Posts:

• The US & EU in the 2008 Financial Crisis: Two Responses and Two Results (30 October 2014)
• Estados Unidos y la Unión Europea ante la crisis: Dos Políticas y Dos Resultados (30 October 2014)
• EU and US Experts Comment on TTIP (05 June 2014)
• Mega Project or Mega Ego? (17 May 2013)
• Wealth Inequality in America (14 May 2013)
• The Reproduction of Privilege (13 March 2012)
• Twenty-to-One (22 Dec 2011)
• The Brandeis ratio: a proposal to tax income inequality (22 Dec 2011)