AMERICA CAN CHANGE

Class warfare is something like that old cliché about a circular firing squad. Those manning the weapons overlook how they could afford the guns.

What does it matter if the guy who owns the company you work for has a mansion in the town’s best suburb, has vacation houses in Florida and Maine, vacations in Europe and Asia, and gets there in his private jet? It matters because he had to pay, directly or indirectly, the contractor and building materials manufacturer and those who work for them; he had to pay for the fine clothes and luggage he and his family bought for traveling, the car and the driver he used to drive to the airport, the people who built his plane, those who maintain it, and those who pilot it. And he had to invest his profits to keep his company going and growing. The entire list of his spending, which benefits other people in many income classes and walks of life, is probably too long even to be affixed here in endnotes.

Politicians are wont to decry those who possess wealth for paying too little in taxes. They are also wont to ignore economic studies that show the top one percent of income receivers pay more taxes than their numbers might suggest, and the lower half pays very little. Too many of those elected officeholders and candidates for those offices attempt to use the disparity between poor and rich to create envy --- and votes.

Their ignorance – vincible or invincible – defies the normal ambition of people to do better, to get better jobs, to make more money, to live at least little more luxuriously. Such desires are fueled by advertising, which describes even marginally luxury goods in glowing terms. Those consumers who are content with their lot for reasons of moral self-sacrifice still will buy what they need. Envy exists, but as with most sins, it is not an everyday vice for most people.

Suppose that true equality of income (and, ergo, class) existed in this or any other society. Everyone would enjoy a comfortable place to live, have enough tasty and nutritious food, have a nice car, vacation at the beach or in the mountains, luxuriate in the beneficence of government.

Really?

Who would design their houses? Who would build them? Who would imagine new ways of cooling and heating the dwellings? Who would sell them? Who would cut the lawns and landscape them? All of that is done under the current system of economics. But what incentive would there be to learn architecture, engineering, business and the rest if at the end personal income would equal that of the guy next door. Why bother? I don’t have to learn a skill – or use one – because everything will be taken care of.

How would the government actually be able to convert capitalism to the new utopia of equal distribution of wealth and what goes with that “wealth”?

Obviously, that conversion could not happen overnight. Equality in outcome could not happen with new legislation effective at the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31. As the New Year a new economy begins! What would happen to the hovels? What would happen to the mansions? What would happen to mac-and-cheese? What would happen to caviar and those little silver spoons?

No, such a sudden change is impossible, probably even with a bloody revolution. Societal and economic changes can only be made slowly because those affected must adapt.

Slowly, like affordable medical care; the enormity of societal change won’t be felt for years, as gradual tightening flattens freedom. Write and pass commercial legislation that covers thousands of pages so that lawmakers don’t have time to read and to understand, followed by bureaucratic rule-making to enforce that law, and business is stifled, new hires are postponed or abandoned. Reduce the military; spending on bellicose material would decline along with the jobs to supply it. Increase entitlements and citizen dependency spreads. Government grows. Freedom wanes.

Real equality may be impossible, but attempts to make incomes and people equal are real and destructive.

America can change. Will we let it? Will we let the effort continue?