I believe the real answer for the most just and responsive political-social-economic system that will best answer the needs of humankind is found in Aristotle's dream (expressed in his Politics, Book 4, Chapter 11) of a constitutionally limited government dominated by the nation's middle class Then--as I believe President Franklin Roosevelt envisioned--we must make the middle class as large and all-inclusive as possible . I believe that eighty percent-plus of the population should fall into the middle class, which I define as making between 50% and 250% of the nation's average income. In the U.S today, this would be an annual income of between $35,000-$175,000. If Marx's proletariat is made part of the middle class--as it nearly was in the period between 1950 and 1980--then this nation will continue to thrive. It is only when the middle class is destroyed by the oligarchs--as it was in Athens, and the Roman and Dutch Republics--that a republic falls.
Through education and an ongoing Federal government commitment to rebuild and maintain both manufacturing and infrastructure in this country, we should, within a generation, be able to reduce the number of people who live in poverty to less than ten percent of our population. Theoretically the poor should--within a few years--be limited to widowed and abandoned spouses, children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled, plus a continually decreasing portion of the population who somehow "slipped through the cracks" in receiving what they need to flourish in our modern society. President Lyndon Johnson proved this could be done: his Great Society programs reduced poverty from 19.1% of the population in 1961, when he took office as Vice President, to 11.1% of the population in 1973, the year of his death. The oil recessions of 1973 and 1979, followed by thirty years of "Reaganomics" I believe prevented the reduction of the percentage of Americans living in poverty below the 10% mark in the U.S.. This mark has been achieved and maintained in Western Europe and Japan for many years, up until the "Great Recession" in 2008.
The secret to a workable social-political-economic system I believe includes limiting the electoral influence and reducing the power of the wealthiest classes (the oligarchs in waiting) with taxes and regulations, so that they cannot become a self-perpetuating aristocracy. Alexis de Tocqueville had an identical opinion one hundred-and-seventy years ago: "What is most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class." ( Democracy in America, volume 2, Appendix 5, "Democracy;" 1840). Retired media mogul Ted Turner expressed a similar, if not identical view concerning his own children; wanting to leave them with enough money to do anything they desired with their lives, but not enough to do nothing.
I believe that at least ten percent of our population should be wealthy, i.e., making more than 250% of the nation's average income. The wealthy are important in a capitalistic system, just not as important as they believe they should be. The figure I quote above would actually represent an increase of income for the 90th to 94th percentiles of the U.S. Population according to the Census Bureau. However, the tax system must be set-up so that the top one percent of the population in terms of annual income earned and wealth possessed, has no more than ten percent of the nation's income, and twenty-five percent of it's wealth. These percentages, which suggested themselves to me when reading former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich's book Aftershock (2011), seem to historically represent a stable level in terms of both accrued wealth and income necessary for maintaining our constitutionally limited, democratically elected, representative republic.
We must understand that poverty and wealth are the opposite arms of the parabola of unsatisfied materialistic desires, and define within their arcs the undifferentiated emotional state of "I want." The difference is in where the twin arcs of poverty and wealth lead.
On the side of the "wants" of those who live in poverty first and foremost is the whole spectrum of materialistic human needs. These needs include food, shelter, clothing, transportation, education, health care, entertainment, employment at a living wage or proprietorship of a business without illegal or monopolistic practices by our competition that makes profit impossible, and social insurance for when we are disabled, unemployed, or elderly. Need is at the core of our inherent instinct for survival. Need drives us to acquire those things that provide us with the basic requirements for both survival and personal growth. For this reason, needs also crossover into that purely emotional area of the need for love, companionship, recognition, etc., that any healthy human requires.
For all of us, but for the wealthy in particular, "I want" represents the purely emotional drive that disguises the wish for the acquisition of power, or self-aggrandizement, or both. This often takes the form of wanting material possessions, which we irrationally believe gives us some sort of superiority and/or power over our fellow human beings. Without a check on the human psyche, there are no limits to want, and no differentiation between want and need.
Sufficiency, "enough" if you will, lies outside the limits defined by the parabola of "want." It is the area of our desires where we realize that what we have is enough, that all we "need," emotionally and materially, for our long-term survival and growth, is in our lives. Unexpected calamities can be dealt with, because we have a "safety net," created by ourselves directly (through savings and insurance), and indirectly--through our government entitlement and insurance programs, including disability and unemployment--to see us through that disastrous period. To quote the late Steve Kangas, "The tax money that goes to social insurance buys each one of us a private good: namely, the comfort of being protected in times of adversity." (See my May 10, 2012 OpEdNews article "A Collective Sigh" for more on this subject.)
If you are compelled to do something, such as paying taxes, you may argue that you are not free. And from a certain viewpoint, you might be correct. But "no man is an island," as John Donne once so sagaciously observed. We exist within the reality of our relationships with our fellow humans, and it is those relationships that define our morality, as Thomas Jefferson so succinctly stated to Thomas Law in 1814, "But I consider our relations with others as constituting the boundaries of morality. With ourselves, we stand on the ground of identity, not of relation, which last, requiring two subjects, excludes self-love confined to a single one. To ourselves, in strict language, we can owe no duties, obligation requiring also two parties." Your rights may end at my nose, but your obligations, your responsibility to undertake your duties as defined by the American Social Contract--which is a part of U.S. law, see Chief Justice Marshall's majority opinion in McCullough v. Maryland (1819), for my proof--do not.
As William Cobbett wrote in his article "To Parson Malthus," in 1819, " To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous." ( Political Register; London, May 8, 1819; reproduced in The Opinions of William Cobbett, chapter 9, edited by G. D. H. and Margaret Cole, 1944). Replace "celibacy" with "fear," or "poverty," or "debt," and replace or add "living on the streets," or "having no school to attend," to "having children to be starved;" and you describe the horror that so many American families face today.
I can think of no greater economic crime against a human being than to force them to work unto premature aging and death, where they not only have nothing to show for their labors, but where they have no choice but live beneath a load of crushing poverty and debt. And yet, this was the condition of fifty percent of the American people eighty-five years ago, before the Great Depression and the New Deal. (See the late Steve Kangas's web site Liberalism Resurgent : Myths About Welfare; Welfare increases poverty. This statistic is d erived from Internal Revenue Service data cited in Donald Barlett and James Steele, America: Who Really Pays the Taxes; Simon & Schuster, 1994; pp. 66-7) The myths about the impoverished in the United States are legion, and none of these anecdotal tales can be supported as being either truly widespread or completely factual. These myths are used to blind the average American into a state of unthinking anger so that the oligarchs--whose nourishment at the public trough makes all of the "welfare" handed out insignificant in comparison--continue taking our government in the direction of an oligarchy where phrases like "right to work" mean "right to work for nothing."
Parabolas have the same etymological root as the word parable, which is defined in the dictionary as " A simple story illustrating a moral or religious lesson. " They are familiar to most of us in their Biblical connotation, in particular in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Probably the most famous of these is that of the Good Samaritan.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a comparison of the actions of "good Jews" and a Samaritan (an individual belonging to a group despised by every "good Jew" because they were once part of the Northern Kingdom of Israel which split away from Judea after the death of Solomon), when they come across a man lying beaten and robbed by the side of the road. The "good Jews" ignored the plight of the injured man, the "cursed" Samaritan took him to a place where he could be cared for and paid for that care out of his own pocket.
The two arcs of the parabola in this case represent humanity's reaction to the Bible's oldest question: Am I my brother's keeper? The "good Jews" ignored the plight of the man laying by the side of road, the "accursed" Samaritan seeing his "brother's" plight, treated the stranger as a brother, seeing that his wounds were tended, and that he would have an opportunity to heal. In other words, he acted the way a "good" Jew was supposed to act.
On February 28th of last year, I published an article here at OpEdNews called " The Communist Takeover of America ." As I stated in that article, "[Edmund] Burke's idea that "The whole business of the poor is to administer to the idleness of the rich;" should be as alien to anyone who loves freedom as the surface of Mars. (see Burke's A Vindication of Natural Society , 1756.) Burke saw no middle class: only exploiter and exploited." This is unfortunately nearly identical to the picture Karl Marx saw a century later when he wrote The Communist Manifesto , and Das Kapital . As I stated in that article, when President Grover Cleveland equated the excesses of capitalism in the Gilded Age to Communism, it was because the invention of the term Fascist lay some thirty years in the future. But, it is also because Communism and Fascism are two arms of the same parabola. They are not opposites, only inverses of one another. Communism is where government runs the corporations; Fascism is where the corporations run the government. Between these arms lies the whole gamut of modern totalitarian regimes.
Our freedoms as a nation and as individuals lie outside the arms of that parabola. It means that some people will no longer have the "right" -- which they never did--to make as much money as they want by exploiting or impoverishing others. Every American has to obey the same set of laws, which so many of the One Percent believe that they are not or should not be subject to.
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