It is time for the middle class to stop accepting crumbs for their labor and innovation. It is time for the middle class to demand, not ask, for programs that recover ill-gotten gains from a system that by design penalizes work and glorifies capital.
Scientists research a subject or natural phenomenon in detail. Engineers use the body of work and research done by various scientists to come up with useful products for us all. Doctors in partnership with scientists and engineers effect the development of tools and medicines in order to provide a service, healing. Businesses employ citizens and sell products and services to citizens. Citizens deposit their savings in banks who lend it out to businesses at fair interest rates that allow the banker and staff a good wage and depositors a fair return on their deposits.
The above is a simplistic view of what free enterprise should look like. Purposely left out are two specific professions, teachers (from elementary school teachers to university professors) and the movers of capital (investment bankers, corporate raiders, etc.).
Without a doubt, the most important profession in the world is in fact teaching. All the professions listed above were the result of teachers moving knowledge to the next generation. The movers of capital, however, can only be considered a parasitic venture.
The movers of capital have no interest in what a particular business does. The fact is that because the movers of capital are generally oblivious to science and subservient to the dictates of an assumed efficient capital market, their moves while making money for a few in the short term, generally hurt those it purports to help. The fact that the movers of capital would support businesses cutting employee hours in lieu of providing healthcare is probative.
The movers of capital lack of wisdom and foresight are evident. 40 years after the oil embargo there were no substantive investments in alternative energy even as countries like Brazil had. They’ve affected a business model heavy on outsourcing to maximize profits at the expense of wages falling locally along with an increase in unemployment. Lower wages and higher unemployment is tantamount to lower sales which spiral a country into contraction. This ultimately leads to an eventual and certain depression.
The indoctrination by a large percentage of our citizens into believing that only these movers of capital have the wherewithal to create jobs while government cannot is provably false. It is this false tenet that allows many to believe their unwarranted worth to our society. Small and large business people create jobs. They are worthy of their profits. Government “we the people” create jobs as well. After-all teachers, police, firefighters, government scientists, engineers, and the like are all real jobs that add to our economy and societal value. A dollar spent whose genesis is the taxpayer receiving a needed service from the government is no different than a dollar spent whose genesis is a taxpayer receiving a needed product or service from a private company.
Sadly, for the movers of capital, it is imperative that the narrative of government not creating jobs metastasize in the American psyche. Only then can they keep unemployment high, wages low, and profits obscene. Is it any wonder they don’t want massive infrastructure spending? Too many jobs created will cause wages to go up and profits to be fairer.
The movers of capital have a vested interest in maintaining their façade of worth to society. They must convince us that while the working man must pay up to 39.6% in Federal Income Taxes and up to 12.4%+ in Social Security Taxes that they should pay just a total of 20% (i.e., all pay 2.9% in Medicare taxes). They must convince our citizens that absent the outsourcing, trading, selling, and bankrupting of companies for which they almost always profit immensely, that job creation for said action occurs in the aggregate. The state of the American economy should dispel this myth. Their goal is never patriotic or noble. It is always to maximize the capital appreciation for a very select few, a privilege the vast majority of Americans are not privy to.
The reality is the movers of capital have been a detriment to our society. They have used outsourcing and offshoring to keep unemployment high and depress American wages. They have purchased politicians to stop governmental job creation. They have usurped the religious ideologues to further pilfer the middle class. The sonogram laws that were passed in several states create a big market for sonograms. The decimation of funding for Planned Parenthood will not lower abortions but instead create a demand for higher cost private abortion clinics. State budget lower taxes decimate education budgets as they increase marginally after tax profits for corporations. Student forced to finance their education with high-cost private loans further enhances the profits for the movers of capital. Implementation of Voter ID ensures that by the time citizens realize their government has pilfered them; the voter suppression laws make them fairly impotent to vote the culprits out.
Society has been programmed to deem these characters meritorious of the highest incomes and thus worth. Worth in America must be reclaimed. Worth must be consummate with what one produces for a society that provides intrinsic value. This is not at all difficult to ascertain. Absent the teacher, education stalls. Absent the engineer bridges, buildings, & computers are non-existent. Absent the doctors we are unhealed. Absent the scientists we do not have a body of knowledge. Absent the movers of capital, life goes on, and the local banker who has a real interest in the community is reborn.
America’s indoctrination by a small class that provides no product or real service to the vast majority of our citizens must end. Americans must first visualize and externalize their real worth to society. They must let loose those shackles of indoctrination. The middle class must not accept the current wage or wealth paradigm. The middle class must assert its worth and force politicians to recover the nation’s treasure and invest it in America and Americans, those that have done the work and innovation to make this country great.