A TRUER COMPARISON

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.