Welcome to Income Inequality Kos.
Join us Thursdays, at 9:00 p.m. eastern. We discuss income inequality, concentration of wealth, and related issues.
Previous diaries in the series can be found by the tag Income Inequality Kos, or by a series history.
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Memes, Myths and Mores
OK, so we've got this problem with Income Inequality, that's been pretty well documented in this series. It's the worst it's been since the 20s and it's worse here that it is in any other industrial democracy. We can look at when Income Inequality started to take off. It was in the late 70s and Income Inequality really skyrocketed after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The government began implementing policies based on the crackpot, "free-market" economics of Milton Friedman. This resulted in a still ongoing, top-down class war. This is all history.
What I want to address here is how this happened. How is it that politicians who intend to wage class war on their own people get elected ?
The answer is culture. Elections take place within the set of ideas; the memes, myths and mores that constitute a "culture".
Now, conservative voters tend to feel rather than think and to believe rather than know. There's a conservative commentator in my town who buys spots on a local radio station. He spews conservative nonsense for a minute or two and closes each rant with: "I'm xxxxx xxx, and this is what I believe." The important thing for him and his listeners is that he believes it. It doesn't matter if it's true or not, or if he even really believes it. This is how they operate. So let's look at some conservative "beliefs".
The government is our enemy.
This may be the worst, most destructive myth ever. Famously formulated by Ronald Reagan as follows: "Government can't solve the problem, government is the problem." This one really resonated and they're still using it. If you're a high-powered capitalist you might see government as an enemy. They want to tax you, they want to keep you from fixing prices and forming monopolies. They want you to pay your workers a minimum wage. Of course, in a democracy the government is "we" not "they"
but many rank-and-file conservatives don't seem to understand this. Maybe they wanted to put an addition on their house and had trouble with the building inspectors or they had to wait in line at the DMV. Whatever the reason, a lot of people bought in. I know government employees who rail against "government bureaucrats". With their new found reverence for the Founders you have to wonder if they understand that what the Founders were founding was the government, our democracy. The election of the people who run the government is the only expression of democracy we have. This latter is the real reason elite, read wealthy, conservatives hate the government. They hate democracy itself and would be perfectly content with a monarchy like the one our Founders rejected.
The government is taking our money.
There's a whole group of conservative myths about taxation. Again, a member of the economic elite may well see taxation as "taking". For the rest of us it's more like chipping in to provide infrastructure and services at cost rather than paying through the nose so some "entrepreneur" can make a profit off our roads or water. I think the average guy buys in on this one because he can't control the price of a gallon of gas or a six-pack, or anything else really, so he sees a chance to reduce his taxes as something he can do to better his condition. He never seems to notice that the tax cuts go mostly to the elite while his taxes remain fairly stable. Somebody's got to pay back the Chinese, right ?
Tax cuts for business create jobs.
There's a corollary here, the notion that corporations give us jobs and if we let them skate on their taxes maybe they'll give us all one. Of course, corporations don't "give" anybody anything. They hire the minimum number of people needed to conduct their business and pay them as little as they can get away with. Still it's a potent myth, despite the fact that the Bush tax cuts reduced our government's revenue by nearly $2 trillion and no net jobs were created during the 2000s. These myths are like zombies, really hard to kill.
This is America, anybody who wants to can get rich.
This one is part of another constellation of myths coming under the heading of American Exceptionalism. At one time this was true. There was more social mobility here than in Europe with its rigid class divisions, but that was a long time ago. The tables are turned now and western Europe enjoys lower income inequality and higher social mobility than we do. A lot of the "trickle-down" economic policies, and the politicians who promoted them, were supported by folks who practiced "aspirational voting". We all know this attitude. They supported policies favoring the wealthy because they expected to become wealthy themselves, since it's so easy in America. If you believe that you'll be a millionaire someday, a tax holiday for millionaires is a good thing, in a selfish sort of way. One wonders if these "champagne wishes and caviar dreams" have been tempered by reality over the last few years.
So there are a few of the myths and memes that allowed the economic elite and their low-information allies to wage class warfare so successfully. These lies and misrepresentations are repeated in the corporate media and used to justify all manner of regressive social policies. If we are ever to reclaim our government and use it to reduce income inequality, we must lay these zombies to rest. We must change the culture of America.