wealth inequality

A Thought Experiment and Explanation


POST 1127
A Balancing Act

Everyone believes in freedom. Everyone wants it.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

You can read Jefferson’s “Liberty” (yes,he capitalized it) as “freedom.”

Let’s make the assumption that we believe in Jefferson’s declaration of equality and freedom and we endorse the expansion of his declaration from “all men” to include, at long last, all women, people of all races, religions, sexual orientation, economic condition – everyone. That claim contains a conflict that is a fundamental of our country.

All men may be created equal in some respects, as in their value as a human being, but neither Jefferson nor we believe that we all were all born with the same innate talents and abilities. Some have great physical talents like athletes and dancers, talents that the rest of us cannot match. Some have the capacity for great intelligence, like surgeons, physicists and philosophers. And some have an impressive talent for amassing money.

We are mimicking Les Miserables with our astounding level of wealth inequality. It is greater than in France in 1789 and greater than just before the Great Depression, as our great rich have amassed more wealth for themselves than the total wealth of over 90% of us. They have and are embracing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but many are left to suffer, some in Dickensian poverty.

In other words, some have the great freedom that comes of great wealth and some have the greatly constricted freedom of just getting by or of abject poverty. Our system is based on an unequal distribution of freedom, this in spite of us all being “created equal” and having “unalienable Rights,” including “Liberty.”

What are we to do with this desire for both freedom and our claim of equality of all? We can level the playing field somewhat by taxing the wealthy and directing the proceeds to the common good, to things which will benefit everyone, including the poor, but that necessarily curtails the freedom of the rich. It’s a challenge that in this country goes back at least to post-Civil War times, when wealthy landowners objected to paying taxes designed to benefit the now-free former slaves with roads and schools. Set aside the moral implications of that statement and just recognize the very real conflict in the balance of equality and freedom.

Generally speaking, Democrats believe that the best thing is to do is to take some money from wealthy people and direct it to the common good, like education, healthcare, infrastructure, national defense and more. Republicans believe in freedom above all and they understandably decry government hands reaching for their wallets for anything other than national defense. Who’s right?

Of course, there’s more to consider in this thought experiment. Thom Hartmann has a fine piece explaining that crime isn’t caused so much by poverty as by wealth inequality. When people feel they’re being treated unfairly by a system that allows such extreme wealth and poverty at the same time, they react quite negatively. Were we to change the rules to achieve a more equitable economy, the logic goes, we would have less crime. It is unavoidable that such a modification would result in less freedom for some. Would we still be the “land of the free” if some were less free than before?

Trump and his coming Fourth Reich are way off the edge of the continuum in favor of ever-greater wealth for themselves and, of course, domination of everyone else. If you think the balance between freedom and equality (call it “equity” or “fairness’) belongs at a place other than off the freedom edge of the continuum, you have a problem.

Those coming into power soon have no interest in you having the freedom/equitable balance you believe is right. They only have interest in what serves themselves, which is ever-greater wealth and power. If you are to nudge that balance away from that far edge and toward something more equitable, wishing for that isn’t going help. You’re going to have to do something.

What’s this Rebel! Stuff?

It’s the verb form of the word, with the accent on the second syllable. It’s about you taking action against the usurpers, the thieves of our freedom, our democracy and what is good about America. Resisting is blandly insufficient. If we are to restore anything resembling the intentions of the Founders we will have to do what they did: Rebel!

To be clear, the Founders made war and I intend nothing of the sort. This is about non-violent rebellion. I advocate fiercely against any civil war that the MAGA violent ones seem to be gleefully anticipating.

This rebellion is about leaning heavily on elected officials to do the patriotic thing, rather than some “don’t primary me” selfishness. It’s about working hard to get liberal democracy candidates elected. It’s about protesting in the streets loudly and often, demanding the America we have been promised, which doesn’t include grift or graft and which doesn’t over-balance in favor of the grossly rich,

THAT kind of Rebel!

If we really want what we say we want, we’re going to do more than we’ve ever done. The promise of the destruction of our Constitution is in the air, made by men and women being put into positions of power by billionaire bullies. The longer we wait to take action, the steeper and more arduous the climb from the coming depravity will be.

Thomas Paine

From Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, The American Crisis, words which he declared to be Common Sense:

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman”

The time for disorientation, apathy and the wringing hands is past. This is the time for action.

Rebel!

Here’s How

From Simon Rosenberg:

Call your Senators and Representative to let them know your dissatisfaction with the rapist, fraudster, traitor and 34 times felon’s pick of Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth and Robert Kennedy; and to inform them of your expectation that they will leave it all out there on the playing field to block these profoundly dangerous nominations whether they have a vote on them or not.

Contact the White House and ask President Biden to order the FBI to begin background checks into Trump’s nominees immediately and before Trump installs Patel to disable the process.

Further, it’s as obvious as it can be: the inept DNC needs new leadership.

One of the most effective Democratic state chairmen, Ben Wikler (WI), is running to become the DNC chairman. He’s done amazing things, like flipping the state Supreme Court to be more liberal, getting Democratic Gov. Tony Evers reelected, picking up 14 congressional seats and more. Check him out at BenWikler.com. And don’t miss Thom Hartmann’s endorsement of Wikler and explainer, America’s Future Hangs on a Democratic Party Decision .

Need motivation? Read Thom Hartmann’s How to Stop the Billionaire Takeover: Democrats Must Declare Class Warfare. He’s right. It’s time to

REBEL!

NOTE: See Michael Shaw’s comment below. Please add your ideas for action in reply to his excellent question.

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Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

The Price of Memory Loss


Reading time – 3:10; Viewing time – 4:35 .  .  .

Here are a couple of examples to make a point.

First, whatever your position on the issue of abortion, just for the moment set aside your religious or moral views, as well as your notion of rights, and focus on practicality.

Regardless of public memory, a lot of abortions really did occur prior to the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. For wealthy women, abortions might have been quietly performed in the examination rooms of their OB/GYNs. For others that option wasn’t available, so abortions often were done in a filthy office or back alley by untrained brutes. Many women suffered greatly from complications like severe infections and even loss of fertility. Some bled to death.

When Roe was decided, abortions came out of those filthy offices and back alleys and moved to safe medical facilities. A lot fewer women experienced complications and far fewer died. That’s the practical piece.

It’s easy to wag fingers about abortions if you don’t have a memory of how bad it was before Roe, which is not to say that all who oppose abortion are unjustified; rather, it’s to say that if Roe is overturned, as is de facto incrementally happening, there will be a huge uptick in the use of filthy offices and back alleys. The price of our memory loss is that a lot of women will suffer and some will die because we no longer remember how bad it really was.

Here’s another example of the practical effect and the price of the loss of historical memory. This comes from Gershom Gorenberg’s piece in The American Prospect:

“As historian Tony Judt showed in Postwar, his great work on recent European history, the Western European welfare states created after 1945 were not products of wild idealism. They were the ‘insecure child of anxiety.’ People understood that the political extremism of the 1930s was ‘born directly of economic depression and its social costs. Both Fascism and Communism thrived on social despair, on the huge gulf separating rich and poor.’ The welfare state was a means to keep the black-shirts and brown-shirts in the past.

“One reason, perhaps, that America built so much less of a welfare state was that it was not left so shattered by the war. Obamacare was a very late, partial effort to fill in the most glaring gap, the lack of a national health-care system. Trump hasn’t given up on destroying that.

“But then, Trumpism is a new movement born of social despair and the renewed gulf between rich and poor. Despair sells the tickets to Trump’s mass rallies, and anger handles the amplifiers for his hateful rants. [emphasis mine]

“How is it that a large minority of Americans could vote for this man, or that a majority of Britons could have voted to leave the European Union, or that the new authoritarianism is rising in European countries wounded so deeply seven and eight decades ago by the old authoritarianism?

“I won’t argue that there’s just one reason. But I suggest that a major contributing reason is that eight decades or nine is the span of a human life. Someone who was 13 in September 1939 is 92 or 93 years old today. We are running out of people who can give firsthand testimony of the war itself, much less of the political madness that gave birth to the war. The last earthquake was so long ago that too many people have forgotten the purpose of the strict building code that followed it.”

With a loss of historical memory we humans have a way of reverting to old ways that were terrifyingly destructive. That’s easy to do with leaders spouting slogans and shibboleths and wild promises of restoring the greatness of some mythical, fictional past. But those slogans, shibboleths and wild promises have a way of making us blind to the full reality of the suffering and destruction they bring about.

The point is that the price of memory loss, whatever the issue, is far too great. That is why we – all of us – must remember.

                      ————————————

Ed. Note: I don’t want money or your signature on a petition. I want you to spread the word so that we make a critical difference. So,

YOUR ACTION STEPS:

  1. Pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe (IT’S A FREEBIE!).
  2. Engage in the Comments section below to help us all to be better informed.

Thanks!


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

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