teacherken recently wrote a diary about an article written by U.C. Berkeley professor of sociology, Arlie Hochschild, Bush’s Empathy Squeezeon why lower class people sometimes vote against their economic interests by voting Republican.
Embedded in this article is a great frame for the ridiculously-super-duper-ultra-wealthy: The Overclass.
We refer to the very poor as underclass, don’t we? So it makes sense to call the top 1% the overclass. I really like this frame because it raises the idea that there really is such a thing as a person with too much wealth. These people with more wealth than God are outside the class system, in some category above even the ultra-wealthy. This concentration of wealth and the resulting concentration of power is anathema to a working democracy. The effective result is an aristocracy. This is one of the reasons we have the inheritance tax: to prevent huge concentrations of wealth in the hands of just a few families.
Not only does a concentration of wealth undermine democracy, it also undermines the free market itself. The overclass historically do all they can to maintain their position. This means market manipulation and unfair business practices. A truly free market requires competition, but how do you compete with someone who has unlimited resources? This is why we have anti-trust laws, to keep competition in the market.
The Republican agenda is the creation of an overclass, an aristocracy. They are, therefore, both anti-democracy and anti-free market.
So lets start using this frame as much as possible. THE OVERCLASS.
