If money talks, it follows that the more money you have, the louder will be your voice. Whether it is more persuasive is another question. Nor does wealth guarantee wisdom.
Education is the acquisition of knowledge. Knowing what to do with it is wisdom.
During the Gilded Age, the super-rich paid no income tax, and the wide disparity of wealth enabled them to live lavish lifestyles while paying their numerous household staffers a bare minimum, with no benefits or security.
Along with this higher standard of living came an assumption that because they had more money, they were therefore more intelligent and wiser than their employees. A heroic assumption at best, and often false, especially in families of inherited wealth.
It was also assumed that poverty was pre-ordained, and people were poor because they deserved to be poor. That disparity began to slide, however, with the coming of organized labor and taxes on income. As workers gained more income, they were able to purchase more goods and services. Even Henry Ford, no fan of labor unions, paid his factory and assembly line workers well enough so they could afford to buy the cars they helped to assemble, thus becoming a built-in market.
Currently, however, paying a paltry or minimum wage means many workers must depend on food stamps and other forms of assistance, which means government is subsidizing companies that pay workers only the minimum.
So much for the ideology of no government involvement in business.
Meanwhile, income inequality has reached levels not seen since the federal income tax was imposed in 1913.
As for eliminating a wage floor and canceling government aid programs, the result would be not only starvation wages, but also anger, resentment and social upheaval. Those days should have ended with the Great Depression, but many ultra-conservative politicians and business leaders still call for lower taxes and government austerity to solve a problem that does not really exist. Or, as Dick Cheney recently said, "Deficits don't matter."
Now we are engaged in a great political donnybrook, testing whether government policies of the past six years have been enough to rescue the U.S. economy from another disaster. Right-wingers call for stricter measures to control a putative immigration problem, spending billions to close national borders even as they demand cuts in government spending and reduced taxes on corporations.
Many follow the Laffer Curve, named after a Reagan-era academic who claimed that reduced taxes (under certain circumstances) lead to more government revenue.
Unfortunately, some follow the Laffer Curve around a rational bend and careen off the road to prosperity into a deeper chasm of income inequality.
Consider this: Much, if not most, of the campaign rhetoric is designed solely to win elections. After all, politics is not about getting things done; it's about winning elections. Getting things done is the responsibility of government.
So when should government step in to get something done and rescue a faltering economy? The answer is not to do things that the private sector could do as well or better, but to do things that are not being done at all. Then, when recovery is strong enough, government involvement must recede.
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