Forum Post: The Accidental Capitalists
Posted 13 years ago on Nov. 16, 2011, 12:27 a.m. EST by australiano
(37)
from Burleigh Waters, QLD
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Occupy Wall Street's threat of class war could be good for everyone -- rich and poor alike: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/11/14/the_accidental_capitalists
Good stuff.
This is a problem for everyone, rich and poor, because international evidence suggests that more equal economies grow faster. In fact, the historical evidence for the Americas, compiled in 2005 by economists Stanley Engerman and the late Kenneth Sokoloff of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) suggests that an early source of wealth in the American Northeast was a colonial farming system based around small landholders that encouraged equality and the provision of public goods -- as opposed to the plantation model used in the South and the Caribbean, which favored a small elite uninterested in representative government or widespread education. Similarly, a number of East Asian countries such as South Korea started their path toward miracle growth with land reform and broad-based education, which leveled the economic playing field. More recently, New York University economist William Easterly and others have argued that a higher share of total income for the middle class is associated with improved outcomes in health, education, stability, and growth for all. Consider the economic burden of unequal opportunity on the United States today, with 9 percent unemployment, seven-tenths of a percent of the country in prison, and 28 percent of the population without a high school diploma.
Of course, actual class warfare itself usually doesn't turn out well for any of the classes involved. But the threat of class conflict is a different matter -- it can help galvanize reforms that benefit not just the poor but the whole of society. And when people in the middle start empathizing with the poor they fear becoming, rather than the rich they dream of joining, reform movements take hold. Take British Prime Minister Earl Grey, who took time away from tea-tasting to expand the right to vote in 1832, explaining, "The Principle of my reform is to prevent the necessity of revolution. … I am reforming to preserve, not to overthrow." Faced with the threat of violence in the streets during the Great Depression, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., at the time a prominent businessman and later Franklin D. Roosevelt's Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, justified his support for the New Deal on similar grounds, writing after the fact, "[I]n those days I felt and said I would be willing to part with half of what I had if I could be sure of keeping, under law and order, the other half." He wanted Roosevelt in the White House, he suggested "for my own security, and for the security of our kids."
Kennedy was right -- Roosevelt's New Deal legislation laid the basis for recovery and sustained, equitable growth over the next 40 years. According to NBER economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the top 10 percent of Americans' share of total national income dropped from around 45 percent in the 1930s to 32 percent in the postwar period and stayed there until the end of the 1970s. Since then, it has climbed back above 40 percent, while average income growth rates have moved in the other direction. The three decades from 1950 to 1980 saw annual per capita income grow at about 2.2 percent a year; the average rate in the 30 years since then has been nearer 1.8 percent.
If the threat of class war helps create pressure to deal with the unearned privileges of the rich and the unrealized potential of the poor, that would be a struggle of which not only Karl Marx but also Adam Smith could be proud. The unlikely class warriors of Occupy Wall Street are derided as a bunch of spoiled kids who should have better things do to than camp out in parks, and maybe that's the case. But they could also be a force for greater economic liberty and, however paradoxically, a wealthier America.
Especially considering the source.
Oh come on, Foreign Policy is quite good actually, they see through their own governments bullshit and its mostly made up of left wingers. hahaha I like their articles, they hit the note right on the head.
Oh I mostly agree. I was being a little sarcastic... I'm pretty sure Foreign Policy is considered part of the NWO/globalist conspiracy that's out to put their socialistfascistzionistimmigrantvaticanrothschildwarmistunitednationsFEMA jackboot on our necks,