Is Class War as Inevitable as the Return of Karl Marx?

I've long written how we should envision America as a continuing revolution against the failed feudal model that crushed human hope in 99% of human societies, across 6000 years. Indeed, our major issues today have little to do with the hoary, lobotomizing “left-right axis.” Not when Enterprise, markets, entrepreneurship and national defense all do vastly better across Democratic administrations, and the state gathers more power into its hands, across Republican ones. 

As shown repeatedly by varied thinkers and economists at the Evonomics site, if he were alive today, Adam Smith would be a vigorous Democrat. (Liberals who reflexively denounce Smith are fools.)

And yet, the “left-right” metaphor, reclaims some meaning, if you go back to its roots! 

Way back in 1789, a bankrupted Louis XVI summoned the French Estates General. When, to his shock, nobles and clerics joined elected commoners in common assembly, the nobles and churchmen sat on the right and the levelers on the left. That is the source of the metaphor.

Then (as now) most (not all) of the nobles insisted on retaining their gross taxation privileges and spectacular disparities in wealth – their inherent right to cheat and not compete fairly. Short-sighted to the last, they would pay a high price for insatiability. (See my earlier posting: Class War and the Lessons of History.)

Fast forward to 2017. We’ve been warned for years that rising disparities in both wealth and power would warp the five flat-open-competitive arenas that made our civilization the wonder of all ages. Democracy, markets, science, courts, and sports – all fail when distorted by cheating.

As Will and Ariel Durant said in Lessons of History: 

"…the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation,

which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth

or by revolution distributing poverty.” 

Karl Marx and his followers were stunned that Americans kept choosing the former over the latter! The Marxists’ jaundiced view of humanity saw our species as reflexive pawns of class imperatives, not sapient beings, able to recognize the edge of a cliff and steer away from it. 

Dogmatists of both the right and the left ignore how the American Founders, in the 1780s, seized up to a third of the land in the former colonies from lordly owners and redistributed it to a favored middle class. A "leveling" far greater than anything done by FDR. That class re-set was accomplished peacefully over here… but with much blood in 1790s France.

Each generation faces trends in human nature that try to re-assert feudalism. Hence, one more anti-feudal re-set was performed by the Jacksonians. Another came after bloody Civil War. Later the Progressives, led foremost by Theodore Roosevelt, gave us a neutral Civil Service and laws against market-warping monopolies. (Both reforms under attack, today.)

Then again, when plutocracy threatened to drive average Americans into radicalism, another Roosevelt led our parents in the Greatest Generation to perform the most successful re-set of all, both reducing disparities to their lowest levels in history and fostering the greatest burgeon of enterprise and wealth of all time. Moreover, the smartest of the rich – those capable of reading Marx and seeing the alternative – supported FDR! The Gates-Buffetts of their day, they figured it was better to be merely very rich, in a happy, middle-class society, than to lose it all in revolution.

== Enemies of Marx keep him alive! ==

Indeed, the terrific Evonomics site (one of the best online) repeatedly shows that our moderate-reformist ancestors had the right idea. This article “The Science Is In: Greater Equality Makes Societies Healthier” by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (authors of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger) agrees with one catechism of the right: that the Greatest Generation of the 40s and 50s were smart and wise! 

Everyone benefited from that era – which the Trump-lumpens dimly nostalgize as the very time when “America was Great.” Forgetting that their parents adored FDR above all other living humans. The creative tsunami that happened then -- under high Rooseveltean tax rates and with strong unions -- made us wealthy enough to take on many challenges, like racial and gender justice and discovering planetary care. 

But the lesson of history is clear: all class re-set solutions tend to get undermined, over time. Cheaters find ways to cheat ... and hence...

...those pesky Marxists never really went away. 

Naturally, they hold that every successful re-set only saves capitalism for another generation. Their dismal assumption – clutched tenaciously - is that human nature is fixed!  (No wonder Marxists hate science fiction, despite old Karl being one of the greatest sci fi writers of all time.)

Moreover, they forecast that a wave of plutocrats will come that is too stupid and self-obsessed to realize how much better off they are, to be merely-way-rich in a confident, middle class society.

Seeking, by dullard reflex, to restore feudal lordship, they will perch above a festering maelstrom of resentment. Only this time and the folks they oppress will have technologies that make WMDs seem tame. 

Oh, how very smart you Murdochs and Kochs are. Driving all the scientists and techies and tech-savvy military men and women to the left. Real smart.

== The crisis of capitalism ==

Some are less foolish. Klaus Schwab, founder and president of the World Economic Forum (WEF), might seem a central figure of the whole Davos-Bildeburger cabal of giga-aristocrats that some see behind every world conspiracy. But – as I depict happening in Existence – some of the top elites on this planet are trying desperately to figure out how they can make a soft landing… to stay rich and privileged in a world that’s healthy and prosperous and (above all) not stewing with revolution.

“As well as getting growth higher (and dealing with wealth disparity) , the WEF identified four areas that need to be addressed urgently: the need for long-term thinking in capitalism; a recognition of the importance of identity and inclusiveness in political communities; mitigating the risks and exploiting the opportunities of new technologies such as driverless cars; and strengthening global cooperation.”

Oh, but the Marxists do have a point about human nature. Those born and raised in wealth tend to, like the French nobles and like Donald Trump, envision themselves the way flatterers describe them, as geniuses. The Saudi Royal House, for example, whose relentless efforts to plant the seeds of caliphate have borne bitter fruit. Or Rupert Murdoch, who worked so hard to train the populist-confederate beast, only to see it seized by a new rider, an impudent Svengali.

Donald Trump frightened the Lords of the Right for a bit. “Throughout the presidential primaries and the general election, the Koch brothers were steadfast in their refusal to support Trump, consistently critical of his candidacy. Charles Koch even once described choosing between Trump and Clinton as picking “cancer or a heart attack.”

Only now those masters think they have the Trump Problem sussed. Knowing how dangerous the brothers are, DT has surrendered to them control over much of his cabinet! 

See this chart to grasp just how many fingers the Kochs now have, pulling strings over our heads.  No wonder enemy #1 is a free press.

== Our special radicalism ==

No, we need to step back and take in the bigger picture.  6000 years of failed feudalism. 250 years of ever rising and improving revolution against that horrid attractor state -- a revolution centered on calm and progressive-scientific-rational and fact-based reform.

 A century - since 1917 - when a different, simplistic, socialist cult seemed to offer an alluring alternative answer to feudalism... only to fade away...

...for a while. Only it's simmering and returning. And "radical Islam" ain't nothing but a place-holder for what's about to come roaring back, risen from the grave.

Now we see the pieces on the table. There is a rising confederacy, puppeted by an oligarchy who think they can restore a newer, smarter feudalism, thinking that they have neutralized the American revolution.

But if they have succeeded at that, then the world's oppressed will run to a different cult. Old Karl has been waiting for this, confident that the American answer... moderate, grownup reasonableness... would fail, sooner or later, allowing the final confrontation.

I say - a plague on both their radical, simplistic, stupid and hellish houses!

I am a child of Ben Franklin. Of Smith, Washington, Lincoln, Anthony, Roosevelt, Marshall and King. And Star Trek. 

You don't get me, I'm the revolution.

International rivalry - is much of it based on theft?

“The Great Brain Robbery”  was the most highly rated episode of 60 Minutes in seven years, about the systematic use of industrial espionage by China and others, featuring interviews based on the work of international tech-econ guru Mark Anderson, whose Strategic News Service is vital for you business-newsletter subscribers, and whose Future in Review” (FiRe) Conference is one of the most important and fun conclaves going. 

Of course the rapaciously insatiable raid on western inventiveness is a case of killing the goose that lays golden eggs. China's rise has been entirely funded by westerners buying stuff from Asian factories. Just as the same raising-up happened in exactly the same way to Taiwan and Korea, to Japan and postwar Europe and many other zones.

How have Yanks been able to afford 70 years of trade deficits that funded this huge project of uplift? By inventing new industries (rockets, jets, satellites, pharma, telecom, the Internet) to replace old ones we shipped overseas, en masse. Our inventiveness is the key ingredient - after Pax Americana peace - that increased wealth in the world, enlarging a positive-sum pie for all to share.

Chopping at the neck of that goose proves that Asian elites are no smarter than those of any other pyramidal-hierarchical, command society across 6000 years.  Here's a hint. Even if it were a smart move... we won't let it happen.

== How might the turnaround begin? ==

Not in Asia, I believe. Remember the “Helvetian War” from EARTH?  It was my forecast (fictional) that the 2020s might feature a consortium of angry developing nations finally getting fed up and declaring hostilities with… Switzerland.  

And other havens for kleptocratic thieves and other cheaters. Cheaters who are the ancient and recurring enemy of not only the poor, but any chance for flat-open-fair-creative capitalism. Now see why this flight of science fictional extrapolation is starting to look ever-more likely:  Follow the money inside the world's tax havens.

From an earlier article in The Guardian: “The world's super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32tn, from their home countries and hide it abroad – a sum larger than the entire American economy.”  According to one expert:

"If we could figure out how to tax all this offshore wealth without killing the proverbial golden goose, or at least entice its owners to reinvest it back home, this sector of the global underground is easily large enough to make a significant contribution to tax justice, investment and paying the costs of global problems like climate change." 

To be clear, this is a separate matter from tax rates! If you think taxes are too high, you should favor international wealth transparency!  Because tax rates on honest citizens would go down, if all the world's skull-duggerously secreted lucre were announced and tallied.  

Indeed, work it out. Those trillionaires would then join the fight for low rates, instead of (currently) chortling happily that you are paying for the roads they use and educating their workers and protecting them from revolution. Nicholas Shaxson discussed this disruption on our economies in his book, Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens. 

They count on that service lasting forever. But even if money can stifle modest protest campaigns, like that of Bernie Sanders, in developed nations, there is always the chance of what I described in EARTH: 

“The struggles of the authorities in Egypt to recover the vast sums hidden abroad by Hosni Mubarak, his family and other cronies during his many years in power have provided a striking recent example of the fact that kleptocratic rulers can use their time to amass immense fortunes while many of their citizens are trapped in poverty. The world's poorest countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, have fought long and hard in recent years to receive debt forgiveness from the international community; but this research suggests that in many cases, if they had been able to draw their richest citizens into the tax net, they could have avoided being dragged into indebtedness in the first place. Oil-rich Nigeria has seen more than $300bn spirited away since 1970, for example, while Ivory Coast has lost $141bn,” notes Heather Stewart in The Guardian. 

How long before some charismatically smart president in some developing nation discovers how much power he/she would have – legally – as a belligerent in an openly and honestly declared state of war against, say, the Cayman Islands? 

Actually look it up, the inherent rights of belligerent states.  Rights that - say - the Phillipines could apply to seize - say - Luxembourg or Cayman assets anywhere in the world, without a single shot being fired!

 What at first might sound ludicrous begins to sound ever-more plausible, the deeper into it you plumb.

== Theft of our chance to thrive ==

One of the surest signs of the treason called the War on Science has been the obstinate confederate religious doctrine that we must do nothing about improving our energy systems.  

If "climate skeptics" had been sincere, they would have said: "While the jury is out, let's improve efficiency and double research. 

"First: just in case 99% of scientists turn out to be right about the danger. 

"But also because efficiency and research are TWODA -- things we ought to be doing anyway, even if climate change proves false!"

That's what sane "skeptics" would have said. 

The fact that the Koch-Saudi-financed obstruction campaign never once said those things but instead always sabotaged efficiency and research proves that the goal was always to delay efficiency and alternative energy sources and to sell as much coal and oil as possible, till the world awakened. 

(After auto fuel efficiency standards finally passed in 2009, during the brief democratic Congress, every dire prediction failed and every single positive one came true.  We have better, cleaner, smarter, more efficient cars and automakers are selling them very cheap but making profits. Guys, does being wrong EVER change your minds?)

Now Paul Krugman weighs in that it's almost game over, amid low gas prices and American energy independence  - with Saudi political influence in the U.S. at a 60 year low - tech is accelerating, solar and wind and storage are now competitive and costs are plummeting. Despite treasonous delays, a transformation is pulling away from fossil fuels, faster than anyone imagined possible... and all of it despite the continuing-insane mania and anti-science, anti-future hysteria.

Imagine how much sooner and how much better a world, if traitors had not delayed this.

== Class warfare ==

I believe one of our problems is that the Rooseveltean reforms – which historians credit with saving western capitalism by vesting the working class with a large stake, (something Marx never expected) – were too successful, in a way. So successful that the very idea of class war seems not even to occur to American boomers. This despite the fact that class conflict was rampant across almost every other nation and time.  But as boomers age-out, is that grand time of naïve expectation over?

Forbes recently announced that just 62 ultra-rich individuals have as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity. Five years ago, it took 388 rich guys to achieve that status.  Which raises the question, where the heck does this rising, proto-feudal oligarchy think it will all lead? 

To a restoration of humanity’s normal, aristocratic pyramid of power (with them staying on top)?  

Or to radicalization, as a billion members of the hard-pressed but highly skilled and tech-empowered middle class rediscover class struggle?

The last time this happened, in the 1930s, lordly owner castes in Germany, Japan, Britain and the U.S. used mass media they owned to stir populist rightwing movements that might help suppress activity on the left. Not one of these efforts succeeded. In Germany and Japan, the monsters they created rose up and took over, leading to immense pain for all and eventual loss of much of that oligarchic wealth.

In Britain and the U.S., 1930s reactionary fomenters dragged us very close to the same path… till moderate reformers did what Marxists deemed impossible – adjusted the wealth imbalance and reduced cheating advantages so that a rational and flat-open-fair capitalism would be moderated by rules and investments to stimulate a burgeoning middle class, without even slightly destroying the Smithian incentives to get rich through delivery of innovative goods and services.  

That brilliant moderation led to the middle class booms of the 50s and 60s and – as I cannot repeat too often - it led to big majorities in our parents’ Greatest Generation adoring one living human above all others: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

There are some billionaires who aren’t short-sighted fools, ignorant of the lessons of history.  Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and many tech moguls want wealth disparities brought down through reasonable, negotiated Rooseveltean-style reform that will still leave them standing as very, very wealthy men.

The smart ones know where current trends will otherwise lead. To revolution and confiscation. 

Picture the probabilities, when the world’s poorest realize they could double their net wealth, just by transferring title from 50 men. In that case, amid a standoff between fifty oligarchs and three billion poor, it is the skilled middle and upper-middle classes who’ll be the ones deciding civilization’s course. And who do you think those two billion tech-savvy professionals will side with, when push comes to shove?

See my earlier posting: Class War and the Lessons of History. 

== Follow the money ==

The father of the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch helped construct a major oil refinery in Nazi Germany that was personally approved by Adolf Hitler, according to the just-released  "Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” by Jane Mayer, a new history of the Kochs and other wealthy families whose meddling in U.S. politics and tax loopholes have netted them billions in returns.  

 Of course there is nothing new about feudal lord cheaters. What is new is our slim but real chance of repeating the miracle achieved by our parents in the Greatest Generation... preserving competition and freedom and a flat-open-fair society, despite every effort to warp it, by short-sighted would-be lords.

How has money warped the political process? In Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections, Richard L. Hasen analyzes the growing importance of campaign financing to modern elections, and three ways in which money has negatively influenced the democratic process, citing electoral outcomes, legislative influence and eroding public confidence.  Hasan proposes reforms -- involving vouchers for citizens to use for campaign contributions and caps on the what a candidate can spend on an election cycle -- that could result in a greater "equality of inputs". 

A Looming Gilded Age: Capital, Affluence & Influence

If books could kill, the attempted oligarchic takeover of America would be dead this week and Wall Street would be flushed clean of villains, leaving a healthy and vibrantly flat-competitive capitalism, in its wake. The best seller lists swarm with fact-filled appraisals that should sway any portion of the population (that reads) into action.

For example, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century became a Number 1 bestseller at Amazon, around the same time that Senator Elizabeth Warren released her book A Fighting Chance -- about how Washington works, and fails to work.

Another hot book is Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, the latest from Michael Lewis on the most recent form of mass-scamming on Wall Street. (I've written about this important book, elsewhere, pointing out how even Lewis missed the worst implication of High Speed Trading, that it might - in a weird way - lead to no less than human extinction!)

And now -- Martin Gilens's Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America was an award-winner in political science last year. His new tome “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” conclusively proves that elites get their way in public policy, far more readily than the People do.

Duh, you say? So you shrug that it is obvious? Alas, your complacency is death to democracy.

Picketty's may be the most important of these books, zeroing in - supported by clear statistics - on how America's seventy year, post WWII vacation from class war has clearly come to an end. That long, prosperous truce -- the most productive and liberating and egalitarian time in all of human history -- can only be re-established if we first have to guts to recognize why it finally failed.

It is still possible to reform with moderate measures, like those one hundred years ago that Teddy Roosevelt used to restore and safeguard the middle class against a looming Gilded Age… or those that half a century later led to the flattest and most socially mobile continental society in history, with a booming middle class and the greatest surge in entrepreneurial growth and startup capitalism, in the wake of that other Roosevelt*…

…or else if such moderate, re-tuning reforms don't come, as Elizabeth Warren warns in her book, we may tumble back into the normal human mode of 6000 years, a pyramid-shaped society of aristocratic rule in which the only options remaining to oppressed masses will resemble those used by the mobs, in 1789 France. (See my earlier posting, "Class War" and the Lessons of History.)

Truly smart rich folk would see that trend, and thereupon join leaders like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, fighting to maintain a middle class civilization… where they just happen to be rich, but not lords. The tech moguls and creative types are behind Buffett and Gates.

(I portray some discussions about this taking place among trillionaires, in the 2040s, in EXISTENCE.)

Alas, those who got rich via resource extraction from public lands, or by inheriting it, or through predatory Wall Street manipulations, seem to want to be like Louis XVI lords. Their behaviors and public statements stunningly resemble those of the Bourbon First Estate. Their reactions to Picketty et al, via messengers like Paul Ryan, are not about negotiation or finding moderate reforms. They clamor, in full frontal attack mode, a no-compromise stance of absolute determination.

As my friend the epic producer of Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski paraphrased recently (with his flair for drama), in The New Aristocracy, they appear to be saying: "We will be your lords. Feudalism is back. Live with it."

== What about those reforms? ==

Professor Lawrence Lessig -- one of the archetype Rooseveltean reformers -- has introduced a SuperPAC, Mayday for the Republic, with the stated purpose of destroying SuperPACs. His plan is to raise enough money from small donations to "buy Congress" and destroy the oligarchical donor system from the inside. (The goal is 5 Mayday-aligned House reps in 2014, then raise enough money to "buy Congress" in 2016.)

Terrific. Give your support.

But as you know, I go to an even more basic level -- transparency. And so LittleSis.org is a free database of who-knows-who at the heights of business and government… aiming to be the antidote to… Big Brother. get it? Pretty much the epitome of citizen-crowdsources sousveillance. This must grow.

Better yet, fight complacency and do what really counts, by reminding all of those who are tempted to sit out the coming mid-term elections:

"It's the Supreme Court, stupid."

== YOUR bill for foreign tax dodges ==

U.S. taxpayers would need to pay an average of $1,259 more a year to make up the federal and state taxes lost to corporations and individuals sheltering money in overseas tax havens, according to a report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "…ordinary taxpayers end up picking up the tab, either in the form of higher taxes, cuts to public spending priorities, or increases to the federal debt,” USPIRG said."

In total, the U.S. loses $150 billion in federal revenue and another $34 billion in state revenue annually because of money parked in tax havens. That’s almost 5 percent of total federal revenue.

Um… can we let that sink in? that's $1,200 out of YOUR pocket, every year. Is this "transparency thing" still an abstraction to you?

See where I explore this (Money Flows that Might Prevent New World Wars)...though I do it more entertainingly in EARTH!

And tangentially in a recent posting: Future Perspectives: Does the ACLU at last understand surveillance?

== Am I a "liberal? ==

Some out there interpret my opposition to an ongoing oligarchic putsch and the new American Gilded Age as evidence that "David Brin is a Liberal" -- despite the fact that no one alive mentions (or touts) Adam Smith more than I do.

Yes I do support liberals (though not leftists) nowadays, for the most part. But that is entirely because of the New Confederacy's blatant abandonment of the old, conservatism of intellects like Buckley and Goldwater and the GOP's open declaration of its intent to ensure that governance fails.  Their agenda of a return to feudalism and the War on Science. In fact, I yearn for the return of a "smithian" libertarianism that might serve as a foil and intelligent balance to reformist liberalism.

If that sounds a bit obscure, then let's just keep returning to that oligarchic putsch -- the skyrocketing wealth and income disparities that seem to be a natural, toxic byproduct when cheating (an inborn human tendency) starts to spoil and ruin the brilliance of smithian market competition.

If we are returning to that age old failure mode, it makes no sense to feel rage -- this is the most natural thing that humans do, when they get power!

We can fix it. Without the insane oversimplifying radicalisms of "all capitalism is evil!" or "all government is evil!" or similar, loony symptoms of "fused political spine disease"… the inability to turn one's head and see flaws in all directions.

"Class War" and the Lessons of History

One aspect of our re-ignited American Civil War is getting a lot of air-play. It is so-called “class war.”

That's the tag-line ordered up by Roger Ailes. The notion: that any talk of returning to 1990s tax rates - way back when the U.S. was healthy. wealthy, vibrantly entrepreneurial and world-competitive, generating millionaires at the fastest pace in human history - is somehow akin to Robespierre chopping heads in the French Revolution's reign of terror.

That parallel is actually rather thought-provoking! Indeed, can you hang with me for a few minutes? After setting the stage with some American history, I want to get back to the way things got out of hand during that earlier 1793 class war in France.  There are some really interesting aspects I'll bet you never knew.

But in fact, "class war" has always been with us. If you ever actually sit down to read what people wrote in times past - for example Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, or even the Bible - then you know struggle and resentment between social castes was the normal state of human affairs for 6000 years, or much longer.  Seriously, randomly choose (or "roll-up") a decade and locale from across the last few millenia! Tell me who oppressed freedom and competitive markets in that time and place. I'll wait.

In fact, today's American perspective that there is no-such-thing as class - so blithely exploited by Fox - seems rather quirky and charmingly innocent.  Baby Boomers, especially, were raised under  unusual circumstances -- perhaps the only stretch of time in which a great nation experienced a (fairly) flat social order.

Now this calls for simplifying - so let's set aside the battles over racial and sexual equality, etc. - but squint with me here, for a minute.  It's fairly obvious that the period following the Second World War was (for white U.S. males) the least class-ridden of all time.  Disparities of wealth were at an all-time low and the middle class, flush with WWII savings, good wages and GI Bill-fostered competitiveness, experienced a generation of utter dominance over the American experience. A confident dominance that got woven into popular culture through TV and all other media.

= Pyramids and diamonds =

Instead of the classic human social pattern -- pyramid-shaped with a tiny, fierce nobility lording it over peasant multitudes -- ours was diamond-shaped with a well-off middle that actually outnumbered the poor! A miracle nobody in all the past ever foresaw. Except perhaps Smith. Certainly not Karl Marx! In fact, nothing so undermined the honey-seductive mantras of Marxism so much as the living example of the U.S. middle class. Which the whole world wanted to join.

And now the penultimate point (before getting back to 1793 France). Our post-WWII flattened-diamond pattern did not quash or undermine competitive capitalism!  Not at all. In fact, never before or since has there been such fecund, vigorous entrepreneurialism as during the flattest and most "level" social order the world ever saw.

Those who proclaim these two things - social flatness and vigorous market competitiveness - to be inherent opposites, in perpetual conflict, are simply fools or historical ignoramuses -- or outright liars. They are pushing the sick illogic of the zero sum game.  Indeed, Adam Smith himself contended, in both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that a relatively flat social order -- combined with lots of opportunities for the poor to get education, so the total number of competitors is maximized -- can vastly increase the total number of people who get rich in the best way, by delivering innovative goods and services.

(Smith held less truck with inherited wealth or dividend-clipping "rents" - the kind of income with the very lowest tax rates, nowadays. In fact, Smith strongly implies that some kind of upper limit to the meaning of "rich" might be called for. But more on that another time.)

= A burden of proof on FDR-bashers =

The final pre-point I want to make here - before tooling off to France in 1789 - is more in the form of a question.  How did we get into a situation where Franklin Delano Roosevelt is portrayed as Satan incarnate?

Yes, yes.  I spend a lot of time around libertarians and I know that their current version is all about hating government.  No other agenda or priority.  See my earlier challenge (two postings back) daring libertarians and decent conservatives to consider taking on a positive goal instead of a purely negative one - fostering competitive enterprise and not just reflexively hating all civil servants, under all circumstances, all the time, while ignoring every other threat to freedom. That may by Ayn Rand, but it sure ain't Adam Smith.

If government is always and automatically evil, then yes, Franklin Roosevelt was the antichrist, because he sure expanded its reach.  If, on the other hand, you judge by outcomes... defeating Hitler, ending the Great Depression, starting the process of racial justice and - above all - engendering a society that both fostered vast amounts of competitive enterprise and kept the social order flat, then maybe we should consider cutting the man some slack.  (Wasn't he admired by the "greatest generation"?)  I'd like to see you -- or any ruler/leader across all of human time -- do better.

Sure, some of FDR's bureaucracy got cloying. Or else it got "captured" and stifled competition.  Democrats themselves axed many New Deal and Progressive agencies - the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Civil Aeronautics Board, for example, had to go!  Others needed trimming and so did the pre-1960 tax rates that JFK slashed.  Indeed, about half of the Reagan-era government prunings seem pretty much called for... a process culminating in the Clinton-Gingrich Welfare Reform, another time that the moderate-right had a strong point. And was listened-to.

But outcomes comparison is not kind to those who gutted Glass-Steagel and other bank regulations, opening the door to abuses that helped bring our Second Depression.  And since every single prediction ever made by Supply Side Economics proved wrong, well, we can understand why science and outcomes comparison are the Big Enemy, attacked by Fox 24 hours a day.  If facts are inconvenient, well, damn those who live and work with facts.

= Okay, back to France =

All the shouts about "class war" bring to mind images of rabid Jacobin mobs in 1793 hauling brave nobles and gentlemen to the guillotine. But if Rupert & co. really want us pondering that image, we owe it to ourselves to leaf back just a few pages to 1789, when the revolution began as a much more moderate thing, inspired by events across the ocean, in America.

France was broke.  Louis XVI and his ministers were incompetents who deliberately squelched commerce with internal tariffs and policies that crushed innovation. The church owned much of the productive land, tax-free. So did the feudal aristocracy. Top merchants and corporations managed to wrangle exemptions too. After years of quagmire wars, poor tax revenue, bank collapses and mismanagement, Louis needed more money to stave off bankruptcy and save the country. So he summoned the Estates General.

That was the rough French equivalent of the British Parliament, but with much less authority.  In fact, it had last met in 1614. But Louis was desperate. What he needed was for the first and second "estates" -- the clergy and  nobles -- to vote themselves a temporary levy and join the third estate (the people) in paying their fair share.

That's how it all started.  The country's leader asking oligarchs and aristocrats to pay the same rates as common folk, for a while, especially since they already owned damn near everything.  The answer given by the dukes and bishops and marquiseseses?  Heck no! We're the ones keeping it all together. The managers and investors and owners and job-makers. The government can damn well keep its mitts out of our pockets. It's our money, not the state's.

Now you can see where I'm going with this. So I won't spell out what happened next. (Though a little reading might be in order?  After the last assignment, to learn what the founder of modern market-capitalism, Adam Smith actually said. I promise surprises!) 

And no, I am not predicting tumbrels rolling through American streets, with billionaires holding their chins high as rabid mobs taunt them on their way to chopping blocks! 

What I am telling you is that "class war" has a whole lot more to it than they are telling you with their blithe, two-word nostrums, over at Fox.  As Warren Buffett said: "my side - the rich - have been winning class war for some time, and it won't end well." 

= The American Difference =

Across the sea, in America, a different experiment was being tried. The aristocracy over here -- like Washington and Jefferson -- certainly enjoyed being rich, and wanted opportunities to stay that way! But they also knew the frontier virtue satiability -- the notion that getting rich is great! Economic success can both entice and propel innovation, hard work, enterprise, competitive creativity and philanthropy. But that (as Adam Smith proclaimed in the miracle year 1776) there comes a point where enough is enough... and sometimes even too much.

Hold onto your seat, because I'm about to tell you something about Washington and the others that you never knew... that they were "levellers."

The founders started by banning primogeniture, so no family fortune could sit and accumulate, undivided, as a lordly demesne at the pyramid's peak. Instead, they would get divided among the large numbers of children that folks had then -- an intentional act of "social engineering" and outright "levelling" and don't you for a moment think otherwise!  They also seized the assets of the Tory lords and even neutral absentees and distributed them to the masses. And they made homesteading easy, with laws that favored Yeoman citizens. (All right, some of the lands they seized belonged to native American tribes - I never called these guys perfect, just smart, with a goal of not repeating the historical mistakes they loathed. Sure, they proceeded to make others.)

Never heard of these "levelling" acts by the founders? Heck, even liberals have forgotten them. Or they've become used to simply ceding Washington and Adam Smith to the blustering right, without even putting up a fight.  Stupid-lame liberals.

The point is that we never had the kind of violent class war that erupted in France, because our elites were smart enough to avoid it! After the primogeniture and distribution and land grant tricks started to fade along with the frontier, we entered a dangerous Gilded Age when the pyramid shape began re-emerging and Marx rubbed his hands over the growing urban proletariat....

...but even among the titans of the 1890s, there were men who could see. "I would rather leave my son a curse than the almighty dollar," quoth Andrew Carnegie, who was the Warren Buffett of his day.  Even a jerk like Henry Ford realized the essence -- that he benefited from a rising middle class that could afford to buy his cars.  And our agile nation came up with moderate solutions like anti-trust laws and progressive tax rates, that staunched class war without ruining capitalist enterprise.  That kept the goose alive, to keep laying golden eggs.

I've already discussed FDR. But now you can see the context of it all!  It is the context of the positive sum game. (Look it up!) The notion that we can get all the benefits of an enterprise-market system -- using the allure of wealth to reward innovators and vigorous competition -- while somehow preventing the toxic side effect of wealth... the poison called oligarchy.  The same poison that ruined markets and freedom in every culture other than ours, in every other era than ours.

= A wake-up call =

So what now? Well, for one thing, it's time to rouse yourself from propaganda hypnosis.  History repeats itself. And the last thing that the New Oligarchs want you to do is study history.

After a full generation of innocence, since the Second World War, in which we took for granted some highly unusual circumstances, we seem now to be plunging back toward the norm for human societies. And you - yes, you - need to start asking questions:

-- like what degree of wealth disparity would you find discomforting?  Today, unlike 1945 or 1980 or 1999, the top 400 U.S. families own more than the the bottom 50% of Americans. Please, please, please pause a minute and picture that in your mind.  If you can somehow manage to shrug that off, is there some level of disparity that would worry you?

When it's 75%? Or when it's 90%? Admit that there is some level that would make even you call yourself (and your country) the victim of class war. A struggle that's gone on (with a recent, slight break) for 6000 years.

-- or ask what it means when Fox says the top families do pay a lot of money in taxes, despite paying at very low rates.  Can you do the simple algebra in your head, divide and put in an equal sign and draw the obvious conclusion?  If they pay vast amounts, even at tiny rates... doesn't that mean they are getting most of the money in the first place?  And that's supposedly a reason for you to... shrug?

-- or ask who is financing the propaganda that you watch? When simplistic tag lines are ordered up at Fox News by Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes and Prince Waleed, and they are parroted within hours by every politician and talking head on the right, perhaps ask "is this the conservatism of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, any longer?" Ponder: what do these New Lords get out of teaching you to hate every American elite of science, intellect or skill, along with your own freely elected government... while demanding that you ignore the one elite that threatens everything we love?  Theirs?

-- for the first time in American history, we went to war - a decade-long quagmire in Asia - and the rich refused to help pay for it. Isn't patriotism an issue all the time, and not just when you (or Glenn Beck) pick or choose?

More important: doesn't this start sounding a whole lot like what the nobles did on the east side of the Atlantic in 1789... and not at all like the smarter elites did in the west?

-- is history really so boring to you that you find it completely irrelevant? So much so that you'll ignore the patterns of 6,000 years?  If so, wow, FDR sure did make a different world for Baby Boomers to ignorantly take for granted.

But the Gen-Xers and Gen-Y and Millennials won't.  As I foresaw in EARTH, they are waking up.

So don't fret, Boomers. Your children will rescue America.  Not with violent class war... what are we, French? But with the kind of tweaking we saw from Washington and Lincoln and Carnegie and Teddy Roosevelt and FDR. (Three of them Republicans.) The kind that restores that flattened diamond... while continuing the miracle of competitive markets and freedom.

David Brin

http://www.davidbrin.com

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