Recently in the national media
there was a certain discussion about whether current calls for
increasing taxes on the rich, the one percent, are comparable to what
the Nazis did to the Jews in the late 1930s. Specifically, there was
a reference to Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass – when
the Nazis launched a coordinated attack on Jewish establishments
throughout Germany and parts of Austria. The attacks were conducted
during the night and were characterized by the resulting broken glass
from Jewish businesses and synagogues. Besides being a tasteless
comparison, I believe a better comparison would have been to the
French Revolution. I must admit, I never read the A Tale of Two
Cities – I saw the movie. And as in the case of Les
Miserables, the story graphically depicts the plight of the lower
classes in pre-revolutionary France as being extremely desperate.
The system, in terms of both the government and non-government, was
totally dedicated to the benefit of the upper classes – royalty and
the aristocracy. This exploitation continued until the lower classes
had had enough and those in power, both in and out of government,
paid a heavy price. Many actions of the Revolutionary government,
headed by the Jacobins, went overboard – we all have seen
renderings of the guillotines – but that amount of built up hatred
toward their one percent found its release. You see, and I'm just
speculating, the reference to Kristallnacht, instead of the French
Revolution, was favored because in the case of the Nazis, their
tyranny was based on a more unreasonable motivation. They were
expressing an extreme form of tribalism in an industrial nation.
While we can condemn the excesses of the Revolution, we can more
readily understand its origins. Now, I'm not saying the French
Revolution is an equitable comparison with what is going on today –
it's not – but it did pit those who lacked economic resources and
all that that entails with those who had extreme wealth. We're not
there yet, but we are drifting in that direction, a direction where a
very few own just about all there is.
That is, income and wealth
mal-distribution are legitimate issues for government to address. If
we listen to the political right, there seems to be a lack of
understanding of this whole concern. They talk as if any mention of
it is an exercise in class warfare, whereas dealing with it might
very well avoid real class warfare. The right likes to support its
contention with a variety of evidence – some true, some out of
context, and some just plain inaccurate.
Citing our founding fathers,
specifically Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, is among this
evidence. In the case of Madison, we have his writings including a
source I have cited in past postings: Federalist Paper Number 10.
For example, there is the following:
As long as the reason of man
continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different
opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between
his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have
a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects
to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the
faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not
less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The
protection of these faculties is the first object of government.
From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring
property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property
immediately results; and from the influence of these on the
sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division
of the society into different interests and parties.
The italicized sentence above –
not italicized in the original – is of particular favor among
conservatives.1
It speaks to their desire to convince us that there is no communal
bias in our constitution. After all, Madison didn't get the moniker,
Father of the Constitution, for no reason and any bias he were
to express is, therefore, a fundamental constitutional principle.
But of course, all of this is taken out of context.
Remember, Madison didn't write the
Constitution all by himself. The Constitution itself,
even, is not in effect because it was written by those who attended
the Constitutional Convention. It is in effect because the members
of the separate Ratifying Conventions in the several states voted for
it. And there is ample evidence that the collective wisdom of those
founding fathers was highly in favor of a communal view of government
and society. After all, federalism is not an individualistic view;
it is a congregational view of government. It is a compromise
between individualism and communalism. And if one reads the
Constitution with this more nuanced eye, it makes a whole heck
of a lot more sense.
Let's look at what a present day
expert has to say about Madison:
[Madison] believed that the
preservation of people's “different and unequal faculties of
acquiring property” was “the first object of government,” but
that a too-powerful government could undermine that goal. He was,
therefore, more concerned with abuses of legislative and executive
power than of unregulated commercial power.2
Jeffrey Rosen, CEO of the National
Constitution Center, in this cited article, goes on to argue that a
shortsighted aspect of Madison's concern was the potential power of
national, private interests such as transnational corporations.
Madison, though, when one takes in the whole sense of this paper, is
concerned with excessive power in the hands of any one actor or group
of actors. Madison just did not see the potential of transnational
corporations that exist today – hence, his oversight. Rosen,
particularly, is focused on the ability of the likes of Google and
Facebook to gather and sell our private information. My concern,
here, is that a reliance on Madison's thoughts concerning the rights
of private concerns when it comes to wealth distribution in our times
is a reliance on ideas taken out of context.
First of all, the history of
government up to that time was not one of a power exercised to
represent or advance the interests of the non-elites. Government, in
the minds of Madison and Jefferson, was a force to represent the
interests of the rich or the landed or both. There were no public
welfare programs; there were no public health facilities, and there
were no jobs programs or employment training efforts paid by the
public treasury. The abuse came about when government was used to
protect and advance the interests of the well-heeled. This is a
practice not foreign to us today. It was that type of abuse that the
founding generation was concerned with unless we're talking about
those who benefited. It was that type of abuse, to unrelenting
degrees of exploitation, that led to the French Revolution and our
republic was to be a model of governance that would be able to avoid
such abuse.
And let me add another word. A
recurring charge by the right is that those who favor welfare or
higher taxes on the rich or who favor programs such as Social
Security, Medicare, or the Affordable Healthcare Act are seeking
policies that aim at “equal results” – that is, they want a
socialist regime to take hold. In the main, this is not true.3
What those who support these policies are serious about providing is
not equal results, but equal opportunity. These are policies that
address those conditions that stand in the way of less advantaged
people having a real shot at the American Dream. Those who oppose
them are either against equal opportunity or they have an unrealistic
view of what it takes to provide it for the majority of those in the
lower classes. And what is asked for will not result in anything
like what faced the deposed elites of Jacobin France. What is asked
for is a fair tax policy, one that asks more from those who get more
for the betterment of all.
1See,
for example, Limbaugh, D. (2010),
http://ricochet.com/main-feed/What-Does-Madison-Teach-Us-About-Wealth-Redistribution
.
2Rosen,
J. (2014). Madison's privacy blind spot. The New York Times,
January 19, Sunday Review section, p. 5. This article argues that
the Constitution has
a deficiency and therefore needs amending. That is, it should have
the expressed power to limit the power of private entities to gather
and distribute private information of individuals similar to the
constitutional prohibition against government to do so.
3I
write “in the main” because there are socialists in this
country, but they comprise a very small minority among those on the
left.
