Smith added a cautionary note, however: "[The] disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition" is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."
Jefferson was acutely aware of this: the Declaration of Independence was the first founding document of any nation in the history of the world that explicitly declared "happiness" as a "right" that should be protected and promoted by government against predations by the very wealthy.
That was not at all, however, a consideration for the architects of supply-side Reaganomics, although they appropriated JFK's "rising tide lifts all boats" metaphor to sell their hustle to (boatless) working people.
Far more troubling (and well-known to both Smith and virtually all of our nation's founders), however, was Aristotle's observation that when a nation pursues economic/political activities that destroy its middle class, it will inevitably devolve either into mob rule or oligarchy. As he noted in Politics:
"Now in all states there are three elements: one class is very rich, another very poor, and a third in a mean. ... But a [government] ought to be composed, as far as possible, of equals and similars; and these are generally the middle classes.
"Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and that those states are likely to be well-administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant."
This is how America was for the Boomer generation until about two decades ago: a 30-year-old in the 1970s had a 90 percent chance of having or attaining a higher standard of living than his or her parents. But, since the 1980s introduction of Reaganomics, there's been more than a 70 percent drop in "social mobility" -- the ability to move from one economic station of life into a better one.
So, if our democratic republic is to return to democracy and what's left of our middle class is to survive (or even grow), how do we do that?
History shows that the two primary regulators within a capitalist system that provide for the emergence of a middle class are progressive taxation and a healthy social safety net.
As Jefferson noted in a 1785 letter to Madison, "Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise."
Similarly, Thomas Paine, proposing in Agrarian Justice (1797) what we today call Social Security, said that a democracy can only survive when its people "[S]ee before them the certainty of escaping the miseries that under other governments accompany old age..." Such a strong social safety net, Paine argued, "will have an advocate and an ally in the heart of all nations."
Tragically, Republicans are today planning to destroy both our nation's progressive taxation system and our social safety net, in obsequious service to their billionaire paymasters.
Flipping Jefferson and FDR on their heads, Republicans last year passed a multi-trillion-dollar tax break for the rich, with a few-hundred-dollars bone tossed in for working people.
Meanwhile, Republicans are already hard at work dismantling the last remnants of the New Deal and the Great Society.
As Ian Milhiser notes, "Republicans in the House hope to cut Social Security benefits by 20-50 percent. Speaker Paul Ryan's plan to voucherize Medicare would drive up out-of-pocket costs for seniors by about 40 percent. Then he'd cut Medicaid by between a third and a half."
This is not, of course, the first time Republicans have tried this. They've been trying to dismantle Social Security since 1936, and Reagan himself even recorded a 33 RPM LP calling LBJ's Great Society proposal for a program called "Medicare" as "socialism," saying that if it passed then one day we'd all look back "remembering the time when men were free."
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