Insight: Plutocracy trumping democracy
Posted: Sunday, August 10, 2014 3:30 am
By Timothy J. Barnett, Special to The Star
A disquieting paradox is increasingly apparent. Americans hope for the self-respect and happiness that arise from a hearty sense of earned merit. Yet, we simultaneously desire greater wealth and advantages than deserved by any prudent measure of social responsibility. We reckon ourselves upstanding because of petty morality, while seeking to exploit lawful loopholes that aid wealth acquisition. Our strange sense of deservedness is rooted in strategic play and name recognition, not the true value of our contributions.
Our bifurcated economic recovery — great for the top 5 percent while meager for the bottom 75 percent — belies claims that all is well. The spread of financial pragmatism (i.e., follow any working trend) has left most Americans inattentive to the morality of national laws that shape economic activity. Indeed, the ease by which we speculate in many markets has calloused us to the notion of earned merit. Ultimately, market opportunity is our moral compass; that is, when we’re not admiring the highly disproportionate rewards of celebrity.
The notion of what constitutes fair opportunity and deservedness changes along with culture, religion and business conditions. This relativity causes many intellectuals to scoff at the idea that culture or politics could ever find sufficient consensus about merit to create an ethos by which various expressions of merit could be evaluated and fairly rewarded. Hence, our politics subsidize and reward financial power, corporatism, interest group demands and the growth expediencies that are allegedly necessary to underwrite entitlements. This system, as widely noted, is a model of unethical financial distribution.
Until the industrial revolution in the early 1800s, Americans’ economic rewards were generally aligned with one’s prudence, labor, ingenuity and stewardship of resources — with a little luck thrown in. As the industrial age dawned, much of this changed, the outcome working to advantage those with capital over others with little but their labor. In Russia, the result was the communist revolution — a movement that endeavored to restore linkage between deservedness and labor. The mantra was: “All workers in a workers’ state.”
In the West, most observers saw the workers’ adage as a deception arising from desperation, with party elites gaining advantage over their proletarian prey. Americans broadly viewed the communist ideology as economically inefficient. Additionally, communism was viewed as unfair to contributions arising from ingenuity, entrepreneurship, business management, the wise stewardship of property and earned capital. Europeans, not quite so enamored by free markets, looked to democratic socialism as a hybrid way.
In America, we thought we had the best of all worlds with a wide-open market system, bounded only for a few robber barons and monopolists. Buoyed by rapid growth, inexpensive land, abundant low-cost resources and other helpful dynamics, the expansion of social mobility seemed to confirm our economic judgments. In short, we felt immune to any need for a national conversation on just deserts. Our market morality seemed amply moored by a robust work ethic, sense of self-responsibility and belief in business propriety (flaws aside). Why would we want big government to tell us what to do when we already knew the answers?
In retrospect, we were caught off-guard by cultural and technological changes. Beginning with the computer age in the 1980s and the blossoming of electronic media shortly thereafter, tremendous leverage was created for exploiting vulnerabilities in our ad-hoc market architecture. Rampant diversity in ideals, orientations, ethics and goals left us with little cultural consensus apart from ambiguous generalities. This is the outcome John Jay feared most in his discussion of the American prospect (Federalist Paper No. 2).
Lacking a unifying vision, our politics fell prey to the only commonality that remained: the chase for prosperity as subsidized by growth. The story of America’s last 10 years demonstrates this point. What we now call “merit” reflects a breakdown in the linkage between contributions and rewards. Nationally, we’re baffled, as nothing in our political toolkit addresses such a challenge.
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EXTRACT ONLY - FULL @ SOURCE
http://www.annistonstar.com/opinion/article_d1931214-1f4c-11e4-ac46-0019bb2963f4.html
Timothy J. Barnett is an associate professor in the political science
department at Jacksonville State University. His Ph.D. was earned at the
University of Kansas.
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This is a fantastic article well worth a read.
Need to link to rest of it (above).
I'm amazed it's come out of the US!
Jacksonville State Uni is Alabama.
Market Morality
Advantage: 5% vs 75%
Advantage: Capital vs No Capital
Free Markets
- Robber Barons
- Monopolists
