The Last Liberal Visionary

[broncofan]

So what is it called when owners profit from their employee's work?

This is the most direct point. Yet, to say this is to accept one of the basic premises of Marx's work, that capitalists make profits based on the work of others. Yet one does not have to accept Marx's conclusions to understand this basic point.

Many of us liberals will happily accept that an entrepreneur has an important place in our society and we do not want to demote him or expropriate his rightful earnings. He has organized a business, he has taken capital and combined it with a vision that has created something greater than the sum of its parts.

Yet there is something else there. He has done this and it has in turn provided him with an enormous reservoir of wealth that can last generations and create dynasties. And he has had the opportunity to do this because he was raised in a country with a certain ethic, a certain amount of infrastructure, a wealth of opportunities for him to take advantage of. What us liberals want is for him to realize that while it is he who has created this wealth, this success did not happen in a vacuum. And others cannot follow in his footsteps unless he pays something back to the system that enabled him to use his vision to create a business or an empire. If one has earned hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and is intent on only protecting it by any means necessary, including by rigging the political system with his capital to protect the rest of it, he prevents others from following in his footsteps.

Republicans will have you believe that not only do ONLY great men generate great wealth, but that they could do it regardless of their circumstances. I am willing to concede many have had great vision but that does not mean they do not owe something to circumstance. Common sense tells us there are great men (and women btw) in every strata of society.

[trish]

The GOP has been complaining that Democrats have invited a war between America’s economic classes, driving a wedge between groups of differing social status and in particular denigrating success. That’s pretty rich spread of lies and a pretty narrow definition of success, a definition so narrow that if you’re not installing the latest in car elevation technology in your summer home’s garage, then you’re not successful. Previously, there were plenty of successful Americans and they didn’t all have summer homes or a fleet of cars. It used to be that if you had family, raised and educated your children and saw them off into the world, had a steady job and a pension on which you could rely when you reached retirement, then you regarded yourself as successful. The GOP does not. In fact the GOP thinks you don’t deserve that pension. Especially if your a public employee like a teacher, or a fireman or a postal worker. They taken to calling your pension a cadallac plan. Yeah, right...a cadallac plan. They blame you, not the wall street bankers, not Bush’s off budget war in Iraq, not the Bush tax cuts nor banking deregulation...no they blame you for the fall of the economy and jobless recovery. Your’s is not the kind of success they find praiseworthy. Indeed you’re not a success...in spite of your years of service, in spite of your professionalism and expertise, in spite of your contributions to family and community, in spite of the fact that you were happy to get by with a middle income salary...you’re a drag on society. You don’t deserve that pension and you don’t deserve a job. Romney would like to fire you, if your GOP governor hasn’t done so already. If you aren’t a public worker, your union has already been busted, your pension raided and your job dissappeared. You’re already enduring hard times. The GOP wants to drive a wedge between you and the public service worker who still has a pension. That’s what they do. That’s how they win votes. With wedges. Have you heard about the wedge between you and your doctor. It actually exists. The GOP wants you to believe it’s the government. No. That multitude of forms you have to contend with whenever you or a family member sees the doctor or goes to the hospital or has a prescription filled...those are from your insurance company. It’s big business that has gotten between you and your doctor. It’s big business that decides what medicines you’re covered for, what procedures and even which hospitials and which doctors you can go to.

[broncofan]

Great post Trish. The Republicans have spent decades excoriating and satirizing those who collect welfare, those who need Medicaid, and have been reluctant to directly attack the Middle Class because they know that their antipathy for the working stiff would expose their agenda and erode their constituency. But in tough times what happens to the Middle Class? What happens to those with graduate degrees who work in the public sector or those who are well-educated and work in the private sector?

What happens when they get laid off and then face a chronic disease without the means to pay for it. This is the social mobility that we have actually seen of late, from the Middle Class to the desperate and the suffering. Admirable people raising families and working hard face tough times and they become the so-called entitlement class. They lose their homes, they lose their pensions, they face health care induced bankruptcy and they become the very individuals that Republicans demonize. And what becomes of their children? Their children see their role models spat on by their government, treated as leaches despite working hard their entire lives, and made destitute by misfortune without any redemption in sight. We really create a lot of justified animosity in the average American when we pretend that they are the authors of their own tough circumstances and that their need for government assistance is borne of sloth or mediocrity.

[Stavros]

What is more interesting to me is why Moynihan, whose political views I believe were shaped by the depression and the New Deal, moved away from the centre ground when it was occupied by the political class that was implementing the civil rights and welfare programmes of the 1960s in which he played a role, as if he felt it had been a mistake.

I think the War on Poverty and the various programmes that the Johnson administration introduced to tackle structural deficits in education and housing among the poor -notably the urban poor- went too far for Moynihan by extending the role of the state, and which appeared to create a dependency on welfare among some social groups which he felt was counter-productive, which is why he ended up in the same camp as Charles Murray.

We seem to me to be facing a dilemma which is the coincidence of welfare provision in societies where mass employment in unskilled jobs no longer exists -this is true on both sides of the Atlantic. Thus, as the state gathers less and less taxes from fewer people in work, the burden of the poor has grown- in the 1960s Moynihan assumed 'depressions' would be temporary.

But suppose the old remedies no longer work, and what we have now is what the future looks like, say, for the next 25 years? How would Moynihan think through social policy for a future in which mass production no longer takes place in Europe and the USA, but in Asia?

Romney says that he will create 12 million jobs in his first term, that is 3 million a year. Where are these jobs going to come from, who is going to do them, are they full-time, part-time, low-paid? There is an assumption that we are in a cycle and that we will all get out of -and the USA is doing better than the UK in this regard- but I feel gloomy about the 'recovery', and think we will have a heavy welfare burden for a long time to come. What is the alternative? To let people starve to death?

[Odelay]

I find it funny how OMK blasts those on this board whose views are on the left, for not giving sufficient homage to a Democratic centrist like Moynihan, but when you point out to him that someone like David Frum is one of the few reasonable voices left within the conservative movement, spittle flies out of his mouth as he declares Frum an apostate, a fraud, and definitely not a conservative. Glass houses and all...

[BluegrassCat]

There is always some liberal on here eager to point out ( mistakenly I might ad) about the Republican's move to the right,

It's pretty funny watching OMK lose his mind as the realization sets in that Obama is going to be re-elected and that he's a member of a dying racist rump party.

So if OMK says it, take the opposite and you'll have the truth.

Here's the actual polarization by the two parties and it's obvious it's almost entirely driven by the GOP.