I do not want to rid us of the concept of wealth, but I do think it is necessary to drastically reduce the wealth gap. I believe we have to find a middle road between a poorly managed welfare state and unchecked capitalism. According to my understanding, a welfare state intends to drive growth but simultaneously creates a sense of entitlement. And unchecked capitalism intends to create wealth but simultaneously discourages effort. And though we can point at some efforts to check capitalism in order to control excessive wealth for the few, we are obviously not doing so in ways that will consistently benefit the many or uplift the downtrodden (which are fast becoming the same), or slow the widening of the wealth gap. In fact, this very month, entangled inroads were made when our government took food away from 700,000 Americans in need. Question: Why? Answer: To funnel more advantage to the wealthy and powerful few, and to continue to widen the wealth gap. We are a wealthy nation, yet we consistently appear to refuse to take care of our people.
We have to find a middle road, yet oddly enough it feels like our current path is moving towards not so much a middle road as it is keeping us in this convoluted entanglement of (occasional) growth, wealth (and an ever-increasing wealth gap), entitlement and quiescence. It feels like we have manufactured a conservative progressivism that cannot find an identity or a direction. I am not an expert and I may be misinterpreting some aspects of this dynamic, but these four factors
- Growth
- Wealth and its accompanying Wealth Gap
- Entitlement and
- Quiescence
Looking closely at the ever-increasing wealth gap, today it seems that growth within our unchecked capitalism is most frequently funneled right back to the wealthy; not necessarily or only because capitalism itself is unchecked, but partially because our bureaucracy is so incompetent and mostly because the wealthy have learned to take advantage of the aforementioned convoluted entanglement.
We have been warned.
In 1832 Andrew Jackson said,
“It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.”
In 1788, in Federalist No. 62, James Madison wrote,
“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood...
…Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?...
…Another effect of [this] public instability is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uninformed mass of the people...
...This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the FEW, not for the MANY.”
And 200 years later, in his book “The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism” published in 1988, Friedrich Hayek (who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974) wrote,
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naïve mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order.”
Interestingly, Hayek, a contemporary, appears to give our leaders the benefit of the doubt by attributing their misdeeds to naïveté, whereas Jackson and Madison appear to foresee selfish manipulation. Either way, if most of us were able to see this for more than 100 years, and some of us were able to see this for 200 years, how is it that Progressives have not been able to see it since early in the 20th century, and neither Progressives or (so-called) Conservatives can see it today?
In this nation we have two parties from which to choose our leaders. The fact of only two parties is sad in and of itself, but it is a different problem from our most pressing challenge. Today our biggest problem is the similarity between the current versions of the two parties. Today our choices are 1) big government where the rich selfishly manipulate the system to get richer, or 2) big condescending, pretentious government where the individual loses autonomy and rights; vanilla or vanilla bean. So in actuality, in today's convoluted entanglement, this is not an either/or but instead a less/more choice.
We have big government and it looks nigh on impossible for us to extricate ourselves from this convoluted entanglement of growth, wealth, entitlement and quiescence that is endorsed and perpetuated by the inner entanglement of the rich and the powerful who have infiltrated and learned to bend and shape our government to their will.
So to find a truly effective middle road, we must first disentangle ourselves as individuals from big government. Big government is not the answer. As suggested by Friedrich Hayek, we must reduce government by decentralizing decisions, but to do this, we as individuals must somehow separate our self from entitlement and from quiescence. We must pay attention to our limited choices, listening carefully to what our factions are espousing and (at this sad moment of political reality) we must choose the lesser of the two evils. In this sad moment we will be unable to extricate ourselves from big government, so I believe we must choose the least divisive evil; we must choose the faction and the voice that will at least acknowledge the individual, no matter how misguided their efforts at granting individual autonomy.
By nature, I am conservative. Horrified by the direction and nature of conservatism in recent years, I have recently gone so far as to identify as a social democrat. Even more recently though, I have realized that this is inaccurate. By nature I have always been conservative, but with thoughtful consideration I now see that as a nation this perspective is no longer a choice. So I am forced to choose less divisiveness and live with more government, because I believe that will allow the individual a little more opportunity to disentangle him or herself from the entitlement and quiescence, which I believe is the first step toward individual autonomy.
To disentangle ourselves as a nation, we must first do so as individuals. And to do so as an individual, I must recognize and work to understand the balanced necessity of each and every individual; and I will never be able to do this as long as I am finding fault and blaming and accusing and pretending and going along for the ride down into our self-made abyss of acrimonious ignorance.
The middle road begins with the individual; and we as individuals must find our way before the middle completely disappears.