Originally posted by: Train
Originally posted by: BoberFett
Originally posted by: bamacre
Originally posted by: Craig234
In short, because the system is doing what wealthy groups want and not making a priority of the middle class in too many ways.
To add to my reply above, you've pretty much hit the nail on the head here, but in a manner which you may not see.
What you have stated here, Craig, is that the wealthy have used government to get their way, at the expense of the little guy, and I don't think there is any disagreement here.
In fact, IMO, that is inevitable. The wealthy will always try to have more influence in government. And in more ways than less, they will succeed.
But what I think you fail to see is that it takes two to tango. Just that it is inevitable that the wealthy try to proposition government, government will accept said propositions.
But then as you increase the size and power of the federal government, you increase the size and scope of the playground for the wealthy. If government is owned by the wealthy, and government gets more powerful, so do the wealthy. On the other hand, if the government is smaller, and weaker, so are the wealthy.
IMO, you shot yourself in the foot.
You're talking to a wall. I've tried explaining numerous times that the rich get richer because of government, not in spite of it.
This is true. if you think about it, progressive tax and spend actually FAVORS the rich. And its doubly ironic (if such a thing is possible) when you consider one of the desired outcomes is to eliminate income/wealth disparities, which if successful (never was nor will be) it would drastically reduce govt income, thus requring further tax increases. One of the reasons I call socialism a downward spiral.
The right is simply misguided in its view that abuse of power by the wealth can only happen through government. Government actually makes it harded for them.
The basic flaw seems to be that the right has a fear of 'the powerful', but they view that only through lenses seeing the government; wealthy people are rather benevolent.
I'm not going to justice to the issue in the attempt, but I'm going to put out an idea that I tthink sadly won't probably help as I'd like.
Think for a minute about human history: think about the palaces for the few, and the hungry, sick, miserable masses who had no escape from poverty.
How do you fix that situation? Historically, the only answer was the people organizing into armed resistance - but that's utterly not practical in today's advanced societies (or good anyway, for reasons ranging from the vast harm of the resulting violence to the lack of guarantee how the new regime will work out - consider from the government of Cromwell to the overthrow of the czar in Russia). To reinforce my point, societies have had this model of extreme concentratin of wealth and poverty for most globally for millenia.
Not because people liked it, because it's next to impossible to do anything about it when it exists.
Almost the only exception to the above in human history is a rare combination of factors - a cultural 'progressive' set of political writers concerned with human rights and improving things for the masses, a society in which there was no elite that was extremely wealthy because there was an overseas group who had that role and took the wealth (the wealthiest persion in the entire society had a modest home and farm), allowing this society to make new rules NOT driven by the greed of the elite, and the security situation one in which the vast distance of an ocean, and the rulers facing another world power, allowed this society *barely* to be successful in armed revolution; and finally, the fact that the leaders of the revolution had a society not all that interested in war, and they had to give the public a lot of power in order to win its support for the war. This rare combination of events, of course, was the American revolution - one which instantly inspired the people of the world to a new order where the powerful were under the rule of law as well.
The key to all this was the vote. It did not create new power; power has always and will always exist in a society from the days when a group of cavemen had a leader, to the ancient civilizations such as Hammurabi, when the basic of their being power over people and extraction of wealth were already in place. Rather, it gave the people a say in who would rule them, focring the leaders to serve the people's interests enough to get elected, in contrast to rulers who had only to control the population, a la Machiavelli's "The Prince".
Read Kevin Phillips' opus "Wealth and Democracy" for a fascinating history of wealth in the US from those early egalitarian days to the slow buildup of concentrated wealth. From the earliest days, the relatively wealthy were already pursuing policies in their own interest against the public interest, splitting the nation from the first presidency as a central issue in the bitter opposition between Jefferson and Adams (the latter also not understanding why a democray guaranteeing free speech should not imprison critics of the president).
It continued as President Jackson vetoed Congress' renewal of the charter of the central bank - and was impeached and came within a vote of being removed. And that's still in the agrarian society of the 1830's. It was the explosion of wealth in the industrial revolution which began to really show the situation. Before that, corporations had been very minor organizations in American society, relatively small with very narrow, highly regulated charters that they serve the public interest. But see what Lincoln said when it started:
?The money power preys upon the nation in time of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me, and causes me to tremble for the safety of our country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic is destroyed.?
The text I bolded was to highlight that not only are there the cautions people expect, but that in a democracy, propaganda to manipulate public opinion is an essential activity.
Every time you see an issue about how the top 0.1% are outrageously getting terrible policies responded to by an average citizen ranting about 'hard work', you see the effect.
The early effects of the increase in wealth were clear - the 'robber baron' class was created, and it owned the government - the Supreme Court became an absurdly pro-wealthy, pro-corporatocracy institution that is an embarrassment to the American legal culture to this day; the Congress and the President served their needs as well with 'laissez-faire' capitalism that had - surprise- some disastrous consequences on the economy and the huddled masses in the 1880's-1890's period, leading to the 'progressive era' backlash.
This was not new; in other societies, the wealthy have had the same sort of privilege and abusive power, but without the public able to do anything about it. It's a testament to the advantages of wealth that in our democracy the wealthy were so able to get their interests represented, through financing, propaganda, corruption, the simple ignorance of the people unable to organize any meaningful opposition (they work hard all day, and are not too able to form national political organizations), and other measures.
In fact, when the progressive era came, it was not through its direct candidate, who barely lost running on a campaign of a 'cross of iron', but through the assassination of the president creating the accidental wild card presidency of the egomaniacal self promoter Theodore Roosevelt, who also just happened to not be quite as directly indebted to the monied interests for his election and in a position to fight for the American people.
For the first century of our nation's history, workers organizing and striking were illegal. In the 1880's, a major steel strike had many people killed, and 160 of the strikers were arrested and charged with treason. Juries refused to convict them; the businesses blacklisted them from work. This is the environment Teddy Roosevelt was in.
Roosevelt railed against any laziness and demanded hard work; but he also pushed for a compromise in a coal worker strike, and higher taxes on the 'malefactors of great wealth'.
It is only through the combination of our democracy and in this case the unintended rise of Roosevelt that such speed bumps for the agenda of the wealthy happen.
Of course, Roosevelt was unique; his successor was right back to the support of the wealthy, leading Roosevelt to unsuccessfully challenge him by creating a progressive party that did not last past Roosevelt, and we were right back to 'laissez-faire' economics until they led to - surprise - the crash of the economy and the Great Depression.
This was another of those rare chances for th combination of democracy and luck to get the public interest represented - and it led to a large change for the better.
You talk about the power of government simply serving the wealthy, but that's not the case. Power is like a knife that can be used for good or evil, and the same is true in terms of power in government. The wealthy were not executed under FDR, as in the French Revolution; they did just fine, though the massive concentrations of wealth they'd built were reduced by government policy, and the people prospered as a result. The economy grew, more people were better off, the middle class was massively expanded.
This is the key point: there are three main situations, not two; two bad, one good:
- When the government is 'corrupted' to serve the wealthy, it becomes an instrument of oppressive power. Whether Monarchy, Right-wing Dictator, or Bush. (Bad).
- When the government power is reduced, the *means of the people to get the situation improved are greatly diminished*. Power is power, and it always finds ways for there to be people who concentrate and abuse it, in the absence of any democatic system. Whether it's one native civilization wiping out the one next to it, or the European powers colonizing other societies, or robber barons hiring people for slave wages forced to live and pay rent in company-owned housing (see modern Chinese labor), 'reducing government' does not 'reduce tyranny'. Tyranny exists without government; or when there is a larger government it attempts to co-opt the government.
*There is no libertarian fantasy land where the concentration of power in some form leading to tyranny, if not blocked by a democratic system, does not happen*.
- What democracy allows is for the public interest to - imperfectly - receive more power, to influence the policies of the government more. This can make the government the 'enemy of the wealthy', at least the wealthy think so; indeed, whether they are organizing a coup against Chavez in Venezuela, or successfully overthrowing Allende in Chile to replace him with a dictator Pinochet who will let the pro-wealthy Milton Friedman economists implement their policies, or the conspiracy to overthrow FDR in this nation by the powerful (not that well known, good General Smedly Butler who was invited to participate and instead exposed the plot), the wealthy don't like when the government inhibits their obscene levels of concentration of wealth, but it can happen.
And that's our best bet. For a Kennedy who understands wealth and tries to lead the nation to do better by its average people - even if he barely wins against a Nixon who is the man who did take orders from corporations to get rid of democracy in Chile in the incident I mentioned above.
When things come together - often with luck involved, but with democratic power for the public, some level of education of the public to get past the pro-wealthy propaganda - things can work better, and you get things like the remarkable event in human history of the United States' middle class expansion, and similar in some other nations who similarly had democracy and more 'liberal' cultures and leaders.
That's what it comes down to - whether society serves the interests of the many or the few. And as I said there are three combinations: a weak democratic government where the power will always be in the hands of the wealthy and abused; a democracy which for whatever reasons is corrupted and influenced by the wealthy; and a government which actually has an agenda of the public good. And guess what - the first two will always say that they are for the public good, too, because it helps pacify the people.
Jhhnn said it well in his statement that it's not the size of government to worry about - many big expansions in government from social security to medicare have had great benefits making them a good idea - but the purpose of government that matters. When the big increases in government are for the wealthy to get access to pay themselves taxpayer money, that's bad. That's what we've seen since Reagan - even tapping into the Social Security monty to pay it out to the wealthy and have the public 'owe itself' trillions.
That's not a problem with 'big' government; if the government weren't big, the people would suffer as much or more from the unelected powerful.
The rephrasing I'd do for his statement though is to say it's simply whether the people's interests are represented or not. And under Republicans since Nixon, they're not.
Indeed, it would be the greatest victory for the wealthy to turn the public against its own democracy - to replace the temporary failings of bad choices to a permanent systemic los of the very power of democracy, to cripple the ability of the people's government to stand up to the wealthy. This is the direction they're headed.
For example, should a nation have the right for its elected leaders, representing the people, to say they think another nation's products are not safe, and to regulate or ban them? Should the government have the right to create environental standards to protect the people?
In the 'free trade agreements' already passed, there is language that allows any corporation who loses sales to any government act - including foreign governments who sign the agreement - to appeal the issue to a secret, private group appointed by the business leaders, who have the authority - given to them by the free trade agreement - to fine the government for all lost income to the corporation, with no appeal to any court of democratically appointed group.
This cripples democracy. Governments cannot afford the liability of billions for every act they take for reasons of serving the public, if a purely business-run group is allowed to second guess them and apply the standard whether *they* think the regulation or policy is justified. That's how you get democracy not to exist, to become more ceremonial while the real policies are run by private wealth, the people unable to stop them.
The obvious position would be for the public to want those treaties modified - but that's very difficult. The wealthy will do all they can to prevent that; and look today, many years after such language was put in, at how little the public is aware of it, how little opposition there is to it, even while it quitely can change policies away frokm the public interest, to force governments to not represent the public, but to 'race to the bottom' on allowing pollution and other dangers to foreign corporations.
So again to summarize:
It's not the size that's so important - look at liberal JFK's small government and how it's the Republicans who have expanded the size so much, for that matter, while when the liberals have expanded it, it's been for the public good generally. It's the knife - to use it for good and not for corruption against the people.
The answer is not to cripple the democratically elected government's ability to stand up to the wealthy and guarantee tyranny as power becomen unelected, when the government is tyrannical as the agent of the wealthy; it is to protect democracy and fight for the public to elect better leaders.
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