Inequality Literally Hurts Americans, and Definitely Harms Our Democracy.
Raising our ideals higher.
Originally published on Medium.
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History tells us inequality is a main reason for the collapse of civilizations, or any massive social disruption. The Roman Empire, and the nation states of ancient Greece, were forever battling their cases of undulating generational inequality. Their aristocrats continually amassed all the wealth, then ran into major problems with the lower classes. Class warfare was the common result of such wealth concentration bubbles. Hostilities over inequality only ended when a decent amount of leveling imploded the extremes.
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Economic conservatives are always touting “free” markets as if they free up everything for the perfect meritocracy Olympic Games. Survival-of-the-fittest is also trotted out as the reason for determining who should win, and who should lose. That nothing else really matters, and government should not protect its citizens from the lives-threatening pendulum it puts in motion. Government must protect private property, but humans caught in the maw of unregulated capitalism can be cut to pieces. It is no wonder flat-out warfare is the result of continual, ever deeper and more harmful inequality.
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Why is The “Survival” Theory of Evolution accepted by evangelical-economic conservatives as gospel when it comes to the “free” market, and human lives being trashed, but in everything else “survive or die” is the existential embodiment of eugenics evil? Some may call that connection contradictory and hypocritical, I just call it Republican Party consistent inconsistency.
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When the economic benefits of a democratic society are significantly misaligned, the great majority of people feel its negative effects. The chicken or egg issue of whether inequality first destabilizes the democracy, or disables the population, is not as important as why both occur. Inequality harms the peoples’ outlook of their present and future. They become angry or apathetic that they or their family are not advancing much, or falling behind. When a small percent has this feeling, it could be associated with envy. Yet, the collective knowledge and perspective of the population is unlikely to be in cahoots with such base beliefs alone. There is a point where base greed and envy cancel each other out, and the reality surfaces of institutionalized greed that develops citizen envy based on actual measurements of hurts and harms.
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Is the perfect measurement 3 to 1 or 3,000 to 1, or somewhere in the middle? I do not know of a predetermined perfect scale to decide the ratio of CEO pay to the average employee, or for other segments of the economy. However, there is no doubt that such matters must be considered, and solved as best as possible, otherwise polarization and class warfare are guaranteed. That said, the tensions inequality creates do not likely come directly from wealth and income differentials. The financial elements are external reasons and data points, mostly. It is the actual harm it inflicts on democracy, and real hurt it causes people, that create the tension, anger, and apathy.
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Ironically, the feeling of improvement is more important than the improvement. Consistent and authentic pats on the back do go a long way. However, this feeling cannot be sustained without the basics being covered, but in between the lines it has its positive societal purposes. Everyone cannot be Jeff Bezos, even if he had only one-hundredth of his wealth, and was still the wealthiest person in the world. Neither can everyone move from the bottom to the next level, let alone all the way to the top of the wealth pile. That being said, there cannot be a huge bottleneck of Americans getting nowhere fast, and especially falling backwards.
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Individual effort is a vital component of improvement and advancement. Yet the economic deck is always stacked a certain way. Past and current government policies, or lack of policies can push some this way, and others that way. Historical entrenchment may never be removed without those trenches being dug out, and made available to others. Making the great bulk of society wait generations for things to improve because of previous land grabs, or wealth concentration is very, very, very risky. Government abuse in a democracy is often not initiated by government officials per se, but by those who have usurped power to help those with wealth gain even more wealth.
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Crony capitalism is the scourge of democracy. Unrestrained capitalism will endeavor to become, or inevitably gravitate towards, crony capitalism. This scenario played out in the democracies and republics of ancient Greece and Rome. There is nothing new about it. The problem is that today’s Republicans ignore these lessons of history with an ahistorical preference being a through-line in all of their ideas about our society. Racial inequality is the perfect example of this ahistorical perspective. Extreme economic and racial inequality are not problems because our political campaign donors benefit from inequality in every area possible. That perspective is their reason for ignoring the hurts and harms of inequality.
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Premature Death & Pursuit of Happiness Detriment.
Yes, extreme inequality actually kills people. The data is in. There is no way around it. Many sources diagnose all the complications including The Broken Ladder by Keith Payne. Yet, economic conservatives often see inequality through a moralizing lens. Poor people are poor because they are lazy, god wanted them to be poor, or some other reason determined without any evidence to back it up. These old-timey moralizing conjectures foul up millions of lives, and deform our democracy.
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Reducing extreme inequality has many health, and societal benefits:
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“The rise in income inequality in the USA in 1980–2015 has coincided with widening inequalities in health and longevity. Not only do the poor have lower incomes, they increasingly live shorter lives than do higher-income Americans.” — The Lancet.
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“Our findings indicate that fine particulate matter [pollution from coal] is especially detrimental to life expectancy in US states with higher levels of income inequality.” — Terrence D. Hill, Andrew K. Jorgenson, […], and Brett Clark, via NIH.
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“In our research, which examined 2 million households across the United States, we determined that air pollution functions as a virtual regressive tax on people with low incomes, particularly in African American communities.” — Tepper School of Business, via Carnegie Mellon University.
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“High school drop out rates to teenage births to violent crime… all are higher in states with greater income inequality.” — Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder.
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“Reducing pollution benefits everyone, but it most significantly improves the lives of the very poor. Conversely, loosening environmental regulations will only contribute to widening the income gap in our country.” — Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University.
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Damaging Democracy Via Parasitic Plutocracy.
The rise of inordinately paid CEOs, current billionaire class, and the coming trillionaire class are having a detrimental effect on our democracy. Once The People are made vassals of the wealthy by such grandiose success pronouncements, as in “we did it all on our own, and since we were the ones who made the money, it should all be ours”, a democracy ceases to be viable and valid. What have The People done if the wealthy did it all on their own?
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Even many millions of Americans have been swept up into this way of thinking. As these talking point myths infect society much beyond the plutocrats into the political class, and average citizens, government is overrun, then plutocratic parasitic actions become viable. It helped cause the rise of Donald Trump, and made possible the exaggerated ramping up of the war on terror industrial base by W. Bush. Rushing through a tax cut for billionaires just a decade after they were bailed out from a worldwide financial crash was the salt on the parasitic wounds still being inflicted.
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Of the advanced OECD nations…
The U.S. has the biggest gap in earnings of top 10% relative to bottom 10%, full-time employees (data from 37 of 37 nations).
The U.S. has the 3rd biggest gap, after Mexico and Chile, as to Household income of top 20% relative to bottom 20% (data from 37 of 37 nations).
The U.S. has the highest level of wealth inequality with 79.5%, as to share of wealth owned by top 10%. The average is 51.7% (data from 27 OECD nations).
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Power dynamics also play a part in the downfall of civilizations, which often are based on extreme inequality. The Roman Empire’s rich fought each other over control in the 2nd half of their reign, which meant not giving commoners enough of a voice, and that would unravel their empire. Their inability to transition into a democracy of We The People doomed them.
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“The issues themselves almost ceased to be as important as making sure your political rival didn’t get a victory. This is really what crippled the Senate. It’s 100 years of focusing on internal power dynamics instead of enlightened reform that caused the whole Republic to collapse.” — Mike Duncan, The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic.
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On the other hand in ancient Greece…
“…the fact that Athens was a democracy with low level of inequality, suggest that at least part of the polis’ remarkable prosperity was broadly shared across the population and did not end up solely in the pockets of the elite.” — Federica Carugati.
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When a Greek nation state did go under, it was due to their destruction by external enemies, or internal strife caused by inequality of wealth and-or representation. For example in ancient Sparta…
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“But it never came to that, because the institutions of the Lycurgan system systematically favored the rich. Wealthy Spartans dominated leadership positions. As a class, the wealthy could act within the constitutional order as a veto player over any move by the less well off to change the system.” — Josiah Ober and Barry R. Weingast, Stanford University.
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Our political system today is not constitutionally limited to the wealthiest citizens and land owners like ancient Sparta, but it is limited by virtue of its current, and potential makeup. Few people of minimal means or even average means can run for a seat in any political office unless it is part time to a very large degree. A full time, or national, office is more amenable due to its ability to compensate a person of modest means, but often too costly to attain via a public campaign. Therefore, We The People are to a very high degree represented by the aristocracy, those who cannot relate to us; they are distant from our life experience, and emotionally unconnected to our plight.
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The Changes Coming, Or Else…
The ancient democratic and democratic leaning societies of Greece and Rome were never perfect, or continually improving in their incorporation of The People into governance responsibilities. They lacked consistency in almost every way depending on the society one was in, and when. One consistent element however was the tendency to extremely increase inequality at some point, while ignoring the cries and demands of The People, until their society collapsed. These are same things we have done, in small parts or in big ways.
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Our highlights or closest calls…
- Shays’ Rebellion in 1786 was our nation’s first near miss, occurred because the government was unable to help farmers bankrupted by the more than seven years of our Revolutionary War, which was due to many wealthy, so-called Americans unwilling to contribute to the war effort.
- Our Civil War in 1861, was due to slave holding aristocrats who had too much power over the government because of the 3/5th’s rule for counting slaves in a state’s representation census.
- The crash of 1873, was due to wild railroad speculation by American plutocrats, and again the government not protecting The People.
- The 1929 Crash, and Great Depression of the 1930s, happened and required the New Deal, because the government was not watching out for us, allowing the moneyed to screw us over.
- Finally, the 2008 Crash, which happened because politicians, bought by plutocrats, opened the floodgates to their wild, swamping our boat greed.
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Either we consistently, and holistically regulate the floodgates to these plutocratic activities, or else…
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Conclusion.
No nation lasts that continually allows its people to be in the path of a raging river, closes its eyes to the danger they are in, or does not feel obligated to help them after the chaos, created by plutocratic fealty, inundates their lives. When the end times of our nation comes, it will be evident in the lack of consideration for, and denigration of, The People.
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By Richard The Chwalek.
A solution to the our mega-dollars corrupted democracy…
Before things spiral out of control, we must up our game. End the go around; hit it harder at the come around with a…richard-the-chwalek.medium.com
We have one chance to get it right, otherwise, we may not have time to claw back all of Trump’s penalizing losses, & do…richard-the-chwalek.medium.com
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