On the Great American Wealth Confusion: We are a nation upside down on how we understand great wealth. It’s no wonder, given that wealth has become the most deceptive of political issues.
We have a Warren Buffet, who projects a quainter image of the benevolent rich guy. He advocates for higher taxes on the mega-rich and talks about the rich having an obligation to the rest of us. On the other side of the wealthy table is an Elon Musk. He believes his accumulation of wealth makes him superior to everyone else. In a James Bond-like way, Musk sees himself as a kingmaker and a shaper of humankind. Lower on the chain of the mega-rich we encounter a Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, whose skill at building monopolies has given them control of much of our vast technology universe. Similarly, Jeff Bezos has put his singular grip around our nation’s consumer purchasing and distribution systems. A bit lower down the gold chain are the Walmart Walton Family, the Koch Family and other second-generation rich folks, who leveraged their original fortune into mega-enterprises. All these people use their wealth to influence and control our political lives. These are the real deal American titans.
Thanks for reading Ike’s Work in Progress! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Then we have the street level rich and those who have hitched their stars to the wealthy. Mostly they are useful idiots for those who really rule the economic world. They may have the kind of money that the average person sees as wealthy (maybe in the millions), but to the masters of the universe, they are supplicants to their thrones. Surely there are folks whose hard work and honest dealings have earned them the money they have. But that’s rarer in America today, where building productive capacity has taken a second seat to draining enterprises and people dry.
This massive hoarding of wealth has come at our expense. If you build productive capacity and advance technology and the delivery of services, you expand the economy and allow for everyone to profit. If you prey upon existing capacity or refuse to share the gains of economic expansion, then you create a rich/poor society. Since our nation’s economy is built on consumer spending, taking away broad prosperity is a sure way to disaster. But the wealthy have done a bang-up job of getting us to agree to their greed. We’ve become confused about what kind of rich is good, and what kind of rich is bad.
In another neat hat trick, the wealthy have purchased a good part of our political system. Yet they’ve kept their hands remarkably clean of their acquisition’s actions. They know our government is the only institution that can thwart their money-grubbing ways. Yet as they use the government to pad themselves, they’ve got us believing that we should see government an enemy to our success. While the rich rig the economic system through things like deregulation, lopsided trade policy and curtailing workers rights, we blame our political leaders. Not those pulling their strings. We’re looking to place blame in all the wrong places.
That brings us to people like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Clinton was a poor kid who hitched his star to the globalists. In him they saw a talented persuader, who could help them sell their version of a planetary economic system. He did their bidding, was successful (for a while) and got rich in the process. We almost lost our entire manufacturing capacity and dove into a dark political landscape.
Trump was the child of relatively minor wealth, but grew up privileged and entitled. He sought to join the mega-rich and the power that money could buy. Like Clinton, Trump has unusual persuasive talents, particularly where it came to giving voice to the fears and inequities of our time. The real rich folks, who have an insatiable appetite for power and money, saw him as just the vehicle to vanquish those who stood in their way. Ironically, many of those who financed Trump’s rise (and their successful promotion of many wealthy business people into our seats of power) now realize that they have created an economic Frankenstein. These are the “corporate people for Harris” and the “right wing economists for Harris”, who realize that they are about to become the dog that caught the tire. A classic case of overreach and blind ambition.
Where does the public stand on all of this? Well the rich have scrambled our eggs. We no longer believe our government can discipline the ultra-wealthy. Worse, we’re getting happy about the scraps we get out of our rich people’s rule. We see rampant evidence of bankruptcies, scams, and rule rigging that has been the hallmark of this generation’s wealth “builders”. Yet, we’ve bought into the myth that business success equals leadership prowess and good judgement. Perhaps the most ironic part of our current view is that someone worth billions of ill-gotten gains will be better for our welfare than someone who had humble beginnings and remembers that. The villains are treated as hero’s and the heroes as trash.
The nail in our collective coffin is our impatience. The degradation of a just economy has been going on for over fifty years now. Yet the wealthy goad us to demand solutions happen immediately. Of course, that’s unattainable, but we’re falling for it. Where a sane and long-term plan is proposed, it never gets the time it needs to show its success. It’s a form of economic abortion that prevents the consideration or implementation of real solutions.
We’re not getting out of this until we put wealth in its place. That starts with clearing up our own understanding of the corrosive role great wealth has played on our economic woes. What motivates the ultra-rich. What policies are necessary to turn things around.
We have to mount a siren call to put a leash on great wealth. They have stolen the money we need to fix what they have broken. We need to take that back. We have to triple our efforts to redirect the assets of our nation into new productive capacity that actually creates new wealth and more good jobs. We have to make sure those gains are fairly shared. The needed environmental “just transition” must provide economic security for those impacted and a path to greater prosperity. It’s way past due that we insist on old age and health care security for all. We have to re-establish fair business practices on Wall Street. That includes re-regulation, re-establishing sane investment and corporate governance rules and aggressive enforcement of white-collar crime. Investing in higher education and skills training for America’s workforce has to get our full-throated support. We have to reopen a path out of poverty. We need to get back to the basics of a healthy economy that works for all.
This means wrestling back the steering wheel from those who have purchased control of our public policy. We have to stop the super-rich from constantly dividing us and mis-directing us. We have to be clear that subcontracting our economy to those whose goal is destructively self-serving, is a bad idea. It starts with replacing confusion with clarity and grievance with broad based opportunity.
ihg 10-3-2024 If you like these commentaries, join my blog for free at:
