We here in the US have a hard time understanding the idea that we are a young country. Although the continent of North America has been inhabited, and thus has had a history going back thousands of years, we in the US tend only to focus on what has transpired in the times beginning with the Declaration of Independence. And in the span of history, these past 300 years or so are the blink of an eye.
There is a certain perspective to be gained by studying the history of more "mature" governments, societies, and economies. And when I say this, I don't mean Ancient Greece, from whence we claim the birth of the ideas that govern us today, but of whom almost no visible trace remains. I am talking about Europe, our immediate predecessors in World political and economic dominance.
We study very little of Europe here in the US. While we marvel over an "ancient" 350-year-old building in St. Petersburg or Savannah, the Europeans marvel over a 700-year-old painting or 1200-year-old building that survived the bombings of World Wars. Their written histories are much more robust than ours, and date back three, four, and five times as long as that of our own country.
If you want to understand where the United States is, in the current evolution of our government or economy, the best place to look is to the previous leaders. How did dominance pass from Europe, some 400 years ago, to the United States? How have the governments of these countries, and their economies, evolved over time? What is the economic fate of their peoples, after this period of dominance?
If you look at the evolution of Parliamentary governments in Europe, one thing you will see that is strikingly different from the US is the proliferation of political parties. Countries like Britain and France, Italy, Germany and Sweden, started out with basically what we have today in the US -- a government where there were two dominant parties. Over time, these two parties became more fractious, a situation we are now seeing in the United States. The thing is, over time the disagreements of the two major political parties in many European countries, led to the formation of many other parties. In current-day Parliaments in Europe, it is not uncommon that elected officials come from a good half-dozen or more political parties.
In addition to this breaking apart and sharing of political power between numerous parties, you will see that most "mature" European Parliaments include what is considered to be Socialist parties. This is true in Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Greece, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, pretty much anywhere you choose to look. And these parties, in direct contradiction to the principles of American insistence on a free-market economy, have been spawned in direct response to the ECONOMIC maturing of these societies.
Why on Earth would this happen, we are likely to ask in the United States.
Well, as societies and their economies mature, they move in the direction of the political parties. The economy in particular will become polarized, and after a time in any free-market economy, the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer. After a time, the only remaining middle class in a mature society, is the one created by government jobs. What we need to consider here is that we will eventually go in exactly this direction. Once a small proportion of the society controls a large part of the wealth, they tend to engage in "nepotism" of a sort that maintains and increases their wealth. If you don't think this is happening today, look up Senators and Cabinet members, past and present, who sit on the Board of Directors of MULTIPLE "publicly owned" corporations.
Our own government is rewarding the rich in ways not reported often in the news. As a "bonus" for having served corporate interests well in Congress or the Senate, many members leave these posts and then are rewarded a nice Directorship at companies whose principal business they have absolutely no knowledge of whatsoever! And then their already considerable wealth is augmented by multiple salaries of multiple corporations. These corporations, in turn, like to garner Federal contracts. And when someone serving the government helps them to do this, they are later rewarded with… OK, you see how the cycle goes.
Free-market economies also develop in a well-established way. They begin with subsistence farming that eventually produces a surplus, allowing for trade to develop. Those who work the hardest and trade the smartest, move out of farming and into larger business. These businesses require a more educated class of citizen, and thus business and education continue to develop together. Eventually, this leads to the dominance of a middle class based on production of durable goods, and the economy is ripe with opportunities for innovators and hard workers to move into the upper echelons of the economy. At some point, though, a large percentage of the wealth of a country becomes concentrated with this upper echelon, at which point the middle class begins to dwindle.
Our sad dwindling middle class at this point in time, still believes that with hard work and possibly smart investment (say, in the stocks of "publicly owned" corporations), they can break into these upper echelons. But the very administrations of these corporations now have every incentive to keep newcomers out! What can a lifelong middle manager with 2.3 children and a house in the suburbs possibly do to augment the wealth of a corporate director? Well, at this point nothing except invest their life savings in said corporation, financing their amassing of yet more wealth. And for this, he is not going to be vastly rewarded.
So, over the course of time, the mature societies developed widely disparate economic groups, separated by a very small middle class supported almost entirely by a government providing jobs of an educated but menial nature. And as the poor got poorer and the rich got richer, even the wealthy began to realize that, without some government intervention to "redistribute" some of the vast wealth owned by a small proportion of the society, mayhem would ensue. Thus, it was economics of past free-market economies themselves that spawned the Socialist movement in Europe.
We here in the US, with our reluctance to learn from the histories of others, really need to get over the cold war. Nowhere was it as intensely threatening as in Europe, which back in the day would have been the theater where weapons of mass destruction would have been first used to test the strength of the nuclear superpowers. Yet in Europe, they have well learned that a little Socialism can go a long way to protecting the integrity of your way of life.
We here in the US have to learn that the wealthy won't stay that way, when the rest of society no longer sees a need to do their bidding. We have to understand that when the government and industry is controlled by the same elite group, solely for their own benefit, that revolution really is underfoot. In this case, we will see what France saw in the 1700s and what Egypt is seeing right now. The middle ground, simply put, is to ensure that there IS a middle class that does not struggle too hard to gain subsistence in the form of housing, food, education and health care.
Basically, all of us in the middle class would be placated if our basic needs were met.
This is a sad admission for a country founded on the idea that everyone has equal opportunity to better themselves through education and hard work. It is an admission that in fact, the odds of the massive success we saw in the 1800s and early 1900s, exists in only a very rare occasion anymore. But realism demands that we face this fact, or commence some giant upheaval of our entire society, government, and economy.
Lest this begin to sound like a great idea, this sort of upheaval, I would like to point out that to do so, would relegate the United States back to the designation of a "developing" country, much like current-day China, much like we were 300 years ago. Property values would crash yet again, the value of our currency would be decimated, and any sort of existing wage guarantees or work-related benefits would disappear entirely. People would be back to subsisting off the land OR working very long hours, in bad conditions, for little pay, just as people in the early Industrial Revolution did. Just as people in developing countries do now.
So the question for the United States, over the next 50 years, is going to be this: Would you prefer full economic collapse and rebuilding, including the return of slave wages and subsistence farming? Or would you prefer a little government intervention, in the guise of redistribution of wealth (a.k.a. Socialism) to preserve a higher, yet un-fabulous, standard of living.
What would you choose?
On a seemingly unrelated note... I I try really hard to give people every opportunity to tell me I'm full of CARP... However, I do request that before you tell me this, that you be a little bit specific ;-)
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