The problem with societies that have massive income inequality isn’t just a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of functionality. In the 18th Century, French peasants really had no hope of improving their lives or the lives of their children. That’s unfair, but it’s also dangerous. Whenever food became scarce, riots were the result. The bourgeoisie could aspire to greater wealth, but they couldn’t protect their interests through the acquisition of political representation. That made for an inefficient economy and the introduction of the guillotine. Perhaps the worst problem, however, was with the privileged classes of the aristocracy and the clergy. Neither group were exposed to a healthy amount of accountability, and particularly in the case of the aristocracy, they lost any semblance of work ethic because they didn’t have to strive and work for their wealth. A nation run by unaccountable priests and trust-fund babies is not going to be prosperous and stable in the long run.
A healthier system has a kind of convection, with people at the bottom constantly rising, while people at the top come back down. Maybe it would be better to say “families” than people. This type of system provides hope to those at the bottom and limits complacency from those at the top. It keeps things dynamic and works against stagnation.
This is why I think it’s important to have a progressive tax code, an Estate Tax, and to make investments that help people to afford an education or gain access to loans. It’s the American Way. When I see a proposal from Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to eliminate all income and corporate taxes and replace them with a higher sales tax, I think that it is counter to the whole spirit of America. Jindal doesn’t understand why our country has been so successful.
But he can make proposals like that because he knows liberals will never resort to 2nd. amendment remedies. Gun control wouldn’t be such a problem if minorities had most of the guns…
Jindal’s just following the example of a number of other states that have operated that way for decades.
But you are right. It’s plantation economics.
Massachusetts, that paragon of liberalism, has had a flat income tax since forever. Ditto Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan. Some of them tax income from dollar zero, too. And they all also have sales taxes.
People either like regressive taxation, or can be persuaded to like regressive taxation more easily than you think.
Perhaps this is why one doesn’t see peasants with pitchforks as often as one might otherwise think. That and the fact that no mob has ever stormed the lord’s castle with pitchforks in one hand and the controller for the console or cable box in the other.
True, but it’s a race to the bottom among the states. Massachusetts has its New Hampshire, for example. The federal government really needs to attach a few strings to how states raise their revenues and how much they subsidize businesses in competition with other states.
MA’s income tax has been flat for 70 years….
but it has one.
Shrinking government down to the size where it could be drowned in a gumbo pot.
Well of course it’s unamerican. It’s the south.
I tired of reading that Republicans “Don’t get it”. They get it PERFECTLY.
It’s just that we libs believe in social mobility and justice for all, etc.
Republicans believe in a ruling caste (as long as it’s them). AND, they’ve figured out that if you get in bed with the religious, you can get about 30% of their country to vote against their own economic self interest every time.
It’s Republican voters who don’t get it.
What you have to watch is how the taxes collected don’t find there way back to the people paying the taxes. Jindal and the GOP will pay themselves salaries, healthcare benefits, and pensions. The GOP has no idea how to effectively target tax revenue so it benefits the tax payer.
It’s not a matter of not knowing how. It’s that benefitting the taxpayer would cut into the grift.
Here’s an American observer on conditions in France in 1785:
It could well be a French observer on conditions in America in 2013.
Being a person quite interested in history it would be interesting to compare French inequality with British in the period. To a certain extant this was luck of geography but less so than other cases.
Colonization in America took some of the pressure off British inequality. What happened in both countries is the effective enclosure of common land into private hands, increased agricultural productivity, and the breaking of the social contract by which feudal lords had the obligation to support the tenants of their villages. The 16th and 17th centuries were times of the poor wandering trying to find ways to support themselves. One way was in upstairs lofts in London in the nascent textile industry.
Again, it seems uncannily parallel to today. The neocons and neolibs are running an unsustainable system. TARP told the 1% they would always be bailed out, but the next crash will be too deep to ever bail out. I hold no hope for proles of our age. They are too given to “God, Guns, and Gays”. They accept their fate. They know it’s wrong but they accept it or irrationally blame those who would help them. But when this generation of young people see their hopes and expectations pushed into the mud and they realize they won’t even have the crappy life their parents had, much less the OK life their grandparents had, then they will revolt and force changes.
Revolutions come from the young, although the intellectual underpinning of their revolution tends to come from their grandparents’ generation.