Class wars just don't play in America

I think I finally figured out the Comrade. I mean, the way he thinks. It's very foreign to me and I would guess to most other Americans.

He sees everything through the lens of "class." Even about the expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts -- the Comrade says something to the effect that extending the tax cuts to everyone would "be giving a break to millionaires and billionaires."

Oh yeah. Millionaires and billionaires who make $250,000 year? Kind of a contradiction in terms, no?

But the main point is his reference to "millionaires and billionaires." I guess "fat cats" has been overworked. The Comrade is counting on the American public to start foaming at the mouth and hating and resenting millionaires and billionaires just as we're supposed to hate and resent fat cats.

Was thinking about that, about how that marxist argument just doesn't play well in the USA and never has. Why, do you suppose?

Marx lived in culture with classes based on birthright -- dukes and barons and princes and all that crap. They owned the land, basically, pretty much along with the peasants who worked it for them -- former serfs. Or, in Russia, actual serfs. Being "born to the manor" or into a titled family pretty much determined if you were rich or if you were going to grub around in the gutters your whole life.

We never really had that kind of system in America. Even in the early days of the republic, when a few people suggested abandoning this bizarre contrivance, the US Constitution, and adopting a tried-and-true system of monarchy. The Founders and general citizenry at the time rejected the idea of established social classes, birthrights and all that jazz -- although a version of this was perpetrated in the slave states for quite a while, with black slaves taking on the role of "peasants."

Ever hear of the Society of Cincinnatus? This was a kind of American Legion type of deal for veterans of the American Revolution. They wanted George Washington to lead their ranks. And if you rummage through historical artifacts, I'm sure you'll find a few images of Washington with laurels on his head and wearing a toga, and somewhere nearby the title "Cincinnatus." Anyway, George Washington refused the honors, because he said he didn't want to endorse or support any kind of organization -- even a social one -- that could serve as the groundwork for a privileged class.

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Code of Virginia -- all the state's initial laws as it became a state rather than a colony. He did something very interesting by abolishing "entailment." Entailment meant that an estate could survive even if a family didn't. That is, if Richard Henry Lee or family accumulated 800 acres of land and 500 slaves, the government could not guarantee that thiis heritage would be kept whole and intact, as estates were in Europe.

Like if Richard Henry Lee gambled away this huge family estate, he gambled it away. End of story. The land might be broken up and sold in smaller parcels, the slaves sold off to pay his debts. Under entailment, Lee would be relieved of this estate by the Crown (or government), who could assign it to someone else as some kind of political plum or to show favor. Just this simple prohibition by Jefferson against entailment ensured that the government of the USA -- or Virginia, anyway -- could never establish or sustain a ruling class. Every generation would pretty much have to take care of themselves, with or without family money.(Of course, since then, congresscritters have contrived all kinds of other ways to hand out plums and favors.)

Virtually every millionaire or billionaire in America was self-made. Astor organized the fur trade and later got into railroads, like Vanderbilt. Rockefeller discovered new uses for "rock oil" and refined kerosene from it to replace whale oil for lamps, later gasoline, etc. Joe Kennedy -- at least as my dad told the story -- made his fortune as a bootlegger. Ford developed the auto industry. And on and on.

Of course, the children of these millionaires and billionaires were just born lucky -- but how many of them are still rich? I mean, Gloria Vanderbilt was reduced to selling blue jeans. Second and third generations are notorious for not doing much on their own, except maybe killing themselves young on booze and fast living. It's hard to get rid of huge fortunes, though. You can put the money in a savings account and live pretty high off the interest. And most millionaires have set up a charity foundation of some kind with their spare cash.

The thing is... Karl Marx was all hot under the collar about the rich because he, like most Europeans, had no chance in hell of ever being rich himself.

In the USA, you can get rich if you work hard enough. You really can. Most people don't want to work with such devotion simply to amass a big pile of money, though. Most people prefer family life and being able to fish or travel in their spare time. That is, they prefer to have spare time. Millionaires usually have to work their butts off to become rich. They have to be single-minded to exclusion of almost everything else. They have to develop certain sets of skills that most people really would rather not bother with.

So I don't hate the rich, and I doubt that most other Americans do either. Being rich is a choice in the USA. Like choosing if you're going to wear a blue or red tie, wear black or brown shoes. Can you really hate people for the personal choices they make about how to live their own lives?

Apparently the Comrade hangs out with lots of people who do hate the rich for their choices. He also lives off that bizarre Marxist thing about how the rich get rich "off another man's labor." But look at it this way -- if the rich didn't give you a job, would you be working at all? Earning anything at all?

And it's interesting.... The Comrade lives in a world made up of only the rich and enormous corporations, and  "the people," who according to his strange mindset, all want to be unionized.

See, it's that European class divide thing again. The truth is, for every huge corporation in the USA, there are probably four or five (or six or seven) hundred small businesses, often family-owned, employing anywhere from two to maybe 500 or even a couple thousand people. And they're still considered "small businesses." These are the "fat cats" and "millionaires" we're all supposed to hate and resent and bury under taxation.

Actually, these are our neighbors.

Ir's the Comrade's world-view that's all wrong. He's been hanging ALL HIS LIFE with marxists and radicals who don't have any better grounding in reality than he does. He himself says he sought these people out and apparently bowed at their feet, kissed their rings, and soaked up all their venom like a sponge.

So the Comrade can go on spouting his hatred and trying to stir up a vicious envy and class hatred, but it just doesn't play very well in America.

We don't hate the rich. We all want to be rich. We know we do have a shot at it, too, if that's where you want to go. But most people are happy with a certain level of comfort and security and don't go for millionaire status. It's just too damn much work.

Save the Republic.