Wealth Distribution in the USA

clairefontaine wrote: »

What?

A political creationist? Are you now name calling to go along with your patronising reply, latent with ad hominem?

Is that the best you can come up with?

clairefontaine wrote: »

What derogatory language?

clairefontaine wrote:

I take a lot of this victim talk about with a huge grain of salt, not that all of it is to be ignored, but that a lot of it is damaging and contributing to the problem because it installs self fulfilling prophesies. It's the language of "you can't."

clairefontaine wrote: »

No. First of all its more complicated than laying blame, I'm not in the blame and shame game.

Secondly, people make up the system.

Thirdly, the language of telling poor people,over and over again they won't get anywhere is part of the system. Say it long enough, and people will believe it.

I think we resolve it the same way Aristotle did. If you go back to the first major book on political theory, Aristotle's Politics (Aristotle was of course dealing with Athens, a city, and he was talking about free men -- not people, so not slaves or women), Aristotle discussed various kinds of political systems and decided that democracy was maybe the least bad so that's the one we should prefer. But he pointed out that there is a real problem with democracy. The problem is that if everyone is free to vote then the ones who are enfranchised -- the poor -- will use their voting power to redistribute the property of the rich -- in other words to achieve justice. And of course we don't want that. He had a solution. But first I should note that Madison raised the same problem at the constitutional convention. Madison was talking about England, the model they were thinking of. In the constitutional convention he discussed the fact that in England if everyone had the vote, again excluding the people who were not allowed to vote like women, the poor would use their voting power to carry out we would call land reform (these were mostly agricultural societies) and that's unjust.

So Aristotle and Madison faced the same problem as the professor you are mentioning -- the conflict between democracy and justice and had opposite solutions. Aristotle's solution was to reduce inequality, and he proposed to what would amount to welfare state measures on a city scale, not on our scale: communal meals and things like that, which would reduce the level of inequality. And then you wouldn't have the mass of the poor taking away the property of the rich. Madison's solution was the opposite: we should reduce democracy. And that's the way our system is constructed. If you look back at the Madisonian system -- the constitutional system -- power was to be in the Senate, and the Senate of course was not elected, remember. The Senate, as Madison explained, constitutes the wealth of the nation, the more responsible set of men, those who sympathize with property owners and their rights. The executive was mostly an executive at the time. So powers were in the hands of the wealthy. There is a House of Representatives and that's more democratic -- it was then, isn't now -- for all sorts of reasons. That had much less authority and power because it was too democratic. And there were other devices to factionalize the population and so on. Now, the population didn't really accept that. It was a radical population at the time. There are long struggles through American history to try to achieve justice within a democratic system. And it's a bitter class war that goes on all the time.

We are now in a period -- roughly this generation -- where the class wars turned sharply in favor of extreme wealth. So we not only have the distribution of wealth that I described, but it also has immediate consequences for democracy, and they're known. There is good work in professional political science studying attitudes and policy and the correlation between them. We have a lot of information about public opinion through extensive polling, quite good polls. The basic result that comes out of gold standard work -- Martin Gillen's and Larry Bartels' and others -- is that about 70 percent of the population is essentially disenfranchised. The lower 70 percent of wealth and income -- their attitudes have no influence on policy. And as you go up the income level you get slowly more influence. When you get to the very top, you essentially get what you want. Well, it's a kind of democracy. Everyone is allowed to push a button or something. But it's nothing like a functional democracy.