Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic
That the middle class is now fighting for its life reflects two intellectual failures. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the intellectuals, political class, and many of the tycoons were pressing for expanded government, the income tax, central banking, and American interventionism and imperialism. The truisms that any expansion of the government’s power and resources would only reduce the people’s liberty and be funded with money stolen from them was overwhelmed by what’s become the standard propaganda: coercion is necessary to address some risk, danger, or “unacceptable” condition. There were no prominent voices connecting the prevalent peace, prosperity, and optimism with the era’s unprecedented personal freedom, nor arguing their essential inseparability.
The other failure: most “average” Americans simply couldn’t comprehend or even conceive of the hatred directed against them. Statism, whatever its variations, is never about doing something forpeople, it’s about doing something to them. Even now, with virulent vitriol and hatred on full display, much of it is minimized or rationalized by people who should know better. The corruption of the “middle-grounders” may run deeper than the statists and the collectivists, who at least no longer try to hide their agenda and acknowledge that freedom cannot coexist with the unlimited governmental power they covet.
When somebody claims that your life is their property, they’re telling you that they have the right to do with it what they will, which includes killing you. All manner of statist belladonna reached full florescence in the twentieth century—socialism, communism, nazism, fascism, welfare statism, cronyism, kleptocracy, kakistocracy—and the murder, genocide, and war have been orders of magnitude greater than anything that preceded it.
You shall know them by their works. The thing that statism does best to people is kill them; the record is clear and unmistakable. Anyone now promoting more of the same is simply evil. Only unmitigated hatred accounts for the particular antipathy directed towards the middle class: their values, their prosperity, and their predominate race (white) and religion (Christianity).
The middle class being a relatively new phenomenon, nobody can say what the consequences of the all-out war against it will be. It is the bedrock of modern economies and its destruction will take out most of the developed world’s productive capacity and consumer markets. That doesn’t seem to bother the statists. How they plan to free themselves from the economies that sustain them is a question they ignore. It calls to mind Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged observation: the deaths they desire the most are their own. That has to be the true definition of insanity. Truer even than Einstein’s: repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
To this day nobody can explain the logic behind the bailouts during the last financial crisis and what ensued, the world’s central banks monetizing massive government debt and pushing interest rates below zero. The high and mighty pretend this is all normal, but for normal people buying a bond with a guaranteed loss is insane. Microscopic rates force them, against their better judgment, into a stock market that’s crashed twice since the turn of the century, decimating their savings, and now sits at historically sky-high valuations. Here is the “investment landscape” you’re supposed to embrace: lose money or put it on the pass line and hope the Wall Street roll of the dice doesn’t once again come up craps.
Keep spending money you don’t have and inevitably you’ll go broke. Keep making promises you can’t fulfill and inevitably you’ll break them. There are hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of claims on the future out there that have no chance of ever being redeemed, yet the pile continues to grow. The mathematical outcome is as straightforward and devastating as playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded.
Obamacare is the latest insane gift from the government that keeps on giving. It’s an obvious failure, but it’s a foaming-at-the mouth, murderous pit bull that from some deranged concept of mercy or an appalling lack of fortitude nobody will put out of its misery. Medical care stands in a long line of industries that malevolence masked as good intentions has destroyed.
As the middle class watches the America it once knew and cherished collapse, and comes to understand why, it realizes its head is on the chopping block. A bright middle-schooler can see that the Green New Deal will bring the economy to a shuddering stop and plunge many who have managed to escape so far into poverty. Yet the Democrats’ leading lights rush to praise the imaginary raiment of would-be empress Ocasio-Cortez.
The middle class has always aspired to better things—the American dream. Talk of 70 percent or higher tax rates and wealth taxes capitalizes on hatred of the rich, it’s open season. Why work and sacrifice to get rich if the government gets it all? Take away middle class dreams and you may well be taking away the last thing that keeps them paying their taxes, observing the law, supporting the troops and police, in short, everything that from the vantage point of the ruling class, “keeps them in line.”
What began as a gentle squeeze a century ago has become python-like constriction. Government has drained economic vitality and shuttered opportunity as the once politically stable, prosperous, and optimistic middle class dwindles.
It’s only going to get worse as debt grows, massive unfunded medical and pension liabilities come due, taxes rise, economies shrink, and promises are broken.
The ruling class has backed the middle class into a corner. Shoving them into poverty and vanquishing their dreams amounts to an unprecedented and dangerous experiment. Aristocratic arrogance, condescension, exclusivity, and isolation add to the combustibility. Yet they remain steadfastly oblivious to the rising anger and the risks. They don’t even recognize the danger of billing the governments they control (or the global one they want to create) as the solution to all problems. Who’s going to get the blame when things fall apart?
What if a substantial portion of the population has taken to the streets and far outnumbers the praetorians? What if praetorian sentiment is with the protestors and insurrectionists? Are the rulers really prepared to use tanks, heavy artillery, bombs, and even nuclear weapons on their own population? Will the people charged with pressing those buttons actually press them?
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