The most extreme plutocrats, disciples of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, hold it as an article of faith that all government programs (except maybe the government's military and law enforcement establishments) constitute some form of socialism and, by extension, a loss of individual freedom.
This leads to one of our optimates greatest lies: that freedom and free enterprise are identical. Hannah Arendt (On Revolution, chapter 6, 1963) said it perfectly: "When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. . . . Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of "happiness". . . has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions."
The real underlying cause of poverty, world wide, is that there are oligarchs in every nation who have a vested interest in keeping as many people in poverty as they can, including the "cheap labor conservatives" in this country. It is far easier to control and exploit an illiterate, despairing populace that is kept at the edge of starvation and destitution, than a well fed, confident and literate citizenry.
I am certain that I will hear cries of "class warfare," and "you hate the rich," from our nation's current crop of plutocrats and wannabes. It was the rise of the American middle class after the Second World War, and their growing insistence that equal rights be applied throughout the American legal and political system, that stirred the forces of reaction in the United States. The growing political and economic power of the middle class, combined with the reduction in the number of Americans living in poverty (by becoming part of the middle class), that frightened men like Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, Antonin Scalia, and Pat Robertson. The empowerment of the poor and middle class, led to the founding of the Conservative Counterrevolution. They have openly worked to undermine the basis for the middle class in America since Ronald Reagan took office.
The plutocrats started the class war, I simply intend to help end it.
I don't hate the rich. There is not enough time in the world for me to hate any human being. But I can and do hate the plutocrats' sense of entitlement. I despise their arrogance, their conceit, and their condescension. They believe that merely being wealthy entitles them to rights and privileges above and beyond that of other citizens of the United States of America.
I think that Gaius Julius Caesar realized Rome's danger (just as I and many others have with the United States) if the extreme imbalance of wealth in Rome, what we call today "the income gap," continued. Caesar had the examples of the Plebeian Secessions in the early days of the Republic, as well as the struggles for democracy in Athens, to guide his analysis. The concentration of economic and political power, without checks or balances, always poses a threat to any form of constitutionally limited republic.
This danger exists in America today. We must change direction before we are permanently saddled with an oligarchic, totalitarian government. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush family and the other American plutocrats do not love the American Republic, and its Constitution, any more than Cato, Cicero, or Brutus loved the Roman.
Naomi Klein, in her new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt, that the oligarchs have been perfecting their methods for using the economy of a nation as a means to trick that nation's citizens into accepting a plutocratic, corporate dictatorship. Or as Mussolini described it, a fascist state.
What I fear, is that the plutocrats (and their corporate proxies) are preparing to apply the lessons they have learned in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Russia and South Africa to the western democracies, in order to cement their domination of the world.
If the American dollar crashes (and that appears to be the direction it is headed), the United States will be thrown into an economic crisis. The rest of the world could be pulled into the abyss with us by the simple expedient of our bombing Iran, especially if nuclear weapons were used. If this occurred, and the plutocrats and their tame institutions (corporations, banks, etc.) were prepared, they might offer a return to economic stability in exchange for political control. If that happens, say goodbye to the social safety net, as Milton Friedman's wet dream of a completely unregulated free market comes back into being, dragging us back (socially and economically) to 1890.
If this happens, people around the world must tell the plutocrats not only no, but hell no!
We must not trade our rights as free human beings for short term stability and comfort. The wealthiest among us must be made to pay their fair share of the tax burden, and that includes their corporate proxies. Large estates (anything over ten million 2007 U.S. dollars) should be taxed heavily in order to prevent and reverse the establishment of a hereditary aristocracy in the United States, a danger both Jefferson and Madison warned us against.
If the primary purpose of government is, to paraphrase Voltaire, redistributing a nation's wealth; our sole choice is whether we move the money from the rich to the poor or the poor to the rich. Ronald Reagan and his successors want to make the rich richer. Gaius Julius Caesar knew that for Rome to maintain any of its traditional institutions and liberties, the wealth (when it became that concentrated) needed to be redistributed from the rich to the poor. Not to the point of equality, but to the point where the rich could no longer run roughshod over the majority of Roman citizens and their rights.
If I must choose between these alternatives, the way of plutocrats like Brutus, Reagan and Bush, or the way of the so-called traitors to their class, the Presidents Roosevelt and Gaius Julius Caesar, the choice is obvious:
Ave, Caesar!
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