Perhaps the saddest part of the working class’s plight in America is that most don’t know how badly they’ve been betrayed by the elite. From Bill Bonner at internationalman.com:
Win-win deals get people more of what they want. Win-lose deals – usually imposed by government – bring them less. The few (the insiders) use government to exploit the many (the rest of us).
Win-lose deals also depress economic progress for everybody. Partly, this happens for an obvious reason.
Dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima was a technical milestone, but not the kind of progress we’re talking about. Progress only makes sense if it means that people are able to get more of what they want.
By definition, when a person is forced into a bad deal, he gets less of what he wants.
Progress is also a learning process. You try something. You see what works and what doesn’t. As people experiment in this way, they learn… and the economy accumulates knowledge and wealth.
They learn to get to work in the morning, for example… to say please and thank you… to save their money… and to invest it wisely.
Win-lose deals interrupt the learning process. That’s why welfare programs fail: People get money without learning.
Temptation to Cheat
That is the real reason the Soviet Union failed, too.
Consumers were forced to buy whatever shoddy products were made available to them; producers had no way to learn how to make good ones.
Toward the end, products available for purchase in the Soviet Union were worth less than the raw materials and labor that went into them.
What do you need for win-win deals?
Three things:
1) People must be free to make choices with their time and money.
2) They must have money they can trust.
3) They must trust each other to respect their rights and property.
These things don’t happen smoothly and without interruption.
Progress is cyclical. Win-win deals add wealth and move society forward. But they depend on trust. And as trust increases, so does the temptation to cheat. When everyone leaves his liquor cabinet open, for example, who can resist having a drink?
Then trust declines. Barriers go up. Costs increase. Win-win gives way to win-lose. Progress goes into reverse.
To continue reading: How the Elites Betrayed Working-Class America
This article illustrates a major difficulty I have with this author and others of his ilk, the use of the term ‘elite’ and the equivalency of ‘wealth’ to ‘progress’. In a majority of the population, these uses and following descriptions of related actions and results equate to the basics of ‘socialism’ and ‘Marxism’ — oppressors and oppressed. Such then feeds into the comparatively newly developed Post-modernism/Neo-Marxism–identity conflict, envy, resentment.
So what do we gain from the article and thinking behind it–the Elite (oppressors) are intentionally and with malice acting against the interest of the 99% (the oppressed middle class/or strugglers to become such) rather than the fact that the Elites are only acting in their own perceived best interest to gain from the system the most of what is or can be manipulated into being–power, wealth, control, protection from the dangers and extremes of life as a human being.
So is it the Elites we must continue to castigate, or more likely the system (dark/hidden/deep state) that we’ve been so much a part of allowing to propagate and grow? We will always have elite amongst us both good and bad, even though the metrics will change per situation and social context, and we’ve been alerted and warned time and again throughout our history, and been provided through bloodshed, philosophy, and such as the Declaration, Constitution, and writings of the Founders the means to prevent or at least apply restraints to abuse of a system that we’ve allowed — even applauded the incremental steps made under naturally occurring and man made events.
We must accept our individual status imposed by Nature, and the Rights derived from our, unique amongst biologics, ability to perceive and rationally determine courses of response and action. Proper use of that ability allows us to perceive, rationally understand, and prepare for the dangers of life–but we can’t place blame on the existence of those dangers or eliminate them. It’s our own ignorance and inaction in the face of the history of mankind throughout history that has and will lead to the downfall of each of us.
Zenphany,
I have no argument with your statement that there will always be elites, but I think the salient question is how the elite get to be the elite. Is it by productive ability and success in a market system, or pull, connections, cronyism, and using the state to perpetuate a tilted playing field and unfair advantages? Having read Bonner for years, when he refers to the elite he is referring to the latter. There are reasons why the average real income in this country hasn’t gone up for over 40 years. Much of it has to do with fiat money and central bank machinations, a point Bonner makes. I would also cite the ever increasing burdens of debt, taxation, foreign military intervention, unfunded pension and medical liabilities, and regulation, plus a horrendous educational system, an increasingly bad medical system, and the welfare state’s assault on the family.
Whether you want to call them the elite or not, somebody made choices and decisions responsible for this state of affairs. It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t you. Whether I call them the elite, or the powers that be, or the Deep State, I will continue to castigate those who have been pulling the levers of power the last century or so, and to post the articles of commentators like Bonner who do the same. I do believe the outcomes from their actions are intentional, and that such outcomes are often motivated by malice. You shall know them by their fruits. Whatever idealistic or noble intentions might have motivated the establishment of say, the Federal Reserve, after over a 100 years, I think its fair to say that it has enshrined a banking cartel, failed miserably in its appointed task of maintaining the value of the dollar, become a debt monetization and interest rate suppression agent for the government’s fiscal policy, impoverished savers and ordinary people (the working class, if you will, of which I count myself a member), and enriched the well-connected insider speculative class with unsound money and discretionary policies communicated beforehand to that class. That’s not Marxist, but rather a description of realities perceived in a 28-year career in the finance industry.