The Flying McCoys by Glenn McCoy and Gary McCoy for March 13, 2011

“And Madison would probably be shocked at the size of our activist, meddling federal government.”

Perhaps, perhaps not. We’ll never know. Perhaps he would be appalled that, more than 200 years after we declared “all men are created equal”, we’re locked into a de facto oligarchy where wealth and political power are as firmly entrenched, consolidated, and heritable as they ever were under the British Peerage. Perhaps he’d be stunned that some people make hundreds of times the money of their employees by making the water unfit to drink and the air unfit to breath. Perhaps he’d be puzzled by the fact that our economy and world standing were at their peak while the top tax rate was 90%, but he couldn’t dispute the numbers.

Perhaps the pragmatist who wrote “Were the plan of the convention adverse to the public happiness, my voice would be, Reject the plan. Were the Union itself inconsistent with the public happiness, it would be, Abolish the Union. In like manner, as far as the sovereignty of the States cannot be reconciled to the happiness of the people, the voice of every good citizen must be, Let the former be sacrificed to the latter” would find common cause with the man who said “The question is not whether government is too big or too small, but whether it works.”

Between you and me, we might agree as to the extent to which government as it stands does not seem to “work” particularly well, but we’d have very different ideas about what a “fix” would look like.

I’m not sure about the rest of the Founding Fathers, but Franklin believed the strength and promise of this new nation were in its Middle Class. Yes, he was adamant about the virtues of industiousness and frugality, but he was deeply distrustful of the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the few. He also believed in the progressive responsibility of the well-off towards civic improvements, and the importance of allowing social (and economic) mobility. Our middle class is shrinking, and those dropping beneath it vastly outnumber those rising above it. If the capital and opportunities to rebuild those losses must come from somewhere (and they must), they must be freed up from those with a stranglehold on the system as it is. To some extent “a rising tide lifts all boats”, but to an equal (if not greater) extent wealth is a zero-sum commodity, and the calcification of it in the hands of the few means it simply isn’t there for anyone else.

It’s astonishing to me how the Right has snookered the middle class into believing that it’s the people below them who are the threat to their own prosperity, rather than the people above them.