On July 30, 2012, Brian Beutler writes on TalkingPointsMemo.com:
Here I’m not talking about the much larger, phony side of the “you didn’t build that” debacle, where Republicans are pretending Obama said entrepreneurs didn’t build their businesses. That’s run of the mill political hackery. But many conservatives were genuinely offended by the fair reading of Obama’s speech — that successful entrepreneurs should contribute more to public works, because they’ve benefited the most from them — because it clashes with their view of what’s most fundamental to individual and group success.
That is reflective of a very deep-seated American can-do attitude, one we identified not so long ago the “Protestant work ethic.” But it has morphed from a shared recognition that hard work and initiative are inherently good, noble character traits into a sense that financial success is a proxy for them — where a high net worth is in and of itself a testament to one’s good character. See, e.g., prosperity gospel.
Many if not most American liberals disagree with this perspective, both for its misunderstanding of merit, and for its common but false correlate that poverty is a symptom of laziness or moral failure. But it’s become central to modern conservative identity. It’s why they’re so confident that the cartoon version of Obama’s remarks is so politically noxious. And yet when Romney leaves the country and applies the same basic conception to larger groups of peoples in nations — Israelis and Palestinians, Americans and Mexicans, Chileans and Peruvians — it creates a huge row, and the campaign has to step in to clean up the mess.
That’s not altogether surprising. An appeal to Americans’ sense of self-determination and an implicit attack on the values of poor countries are politically very different things. But they spring from the same view of the world, and it’s strange in a way to see Romney running away from that view in one context and charging directly at it in another.
Inconveniently for plutocrats such as Romney, the United State is still a political democracy committed constitutionally to economic democracy. Wealth concentration is repugnant not only to democratic ideals and sensibilities but to several guarantees of the Constitution itself. It is also structurally antagonistic to the private property, free market economy that is the proper economic complement of political democracy. Therefore, the reigning princes of plutocracy–the same interests President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “economic royalists”–find it necessary to repackage for political resale the old myths, which rationalize their virtual monopoly of productive capital ownership.
Plutocrats also have a psychological problem in a political democracy. There is a phenomenon called wealth-guilt, which the German sociologist Hemut Schoeck analyzes most perceptively in “Envy: A Theory Of Social Behavior.” It is not enough to be rich; the possession of wealth must somehow be justified in a social context where the overwhelming majority of people are poor and, as far as the “system” is concerned, destined to perpetual poverty. Riches must somehow be deserved, merited, sanctified. Thus, the apologist for wealth concentration must frame his defense with the sensibilities of the plutocrat mind, as well as those of the larger society.
The rationalization of wealth concentration in a political democracy involves, first, diverting public attention from the phenomenon itself. Just as the apologist for war dislikes photographs of the slaughtered and wounded, the wealth apologist dislikes statistics depicting the distribution of wealth and income. He or she dislikes rigorous distinctions about what wealth is and what it means in the lives of real people, and what its absence is like. He or she is not about to divulge the source of wealth even if known. It is also necessary to maintain the illusion that the road to wealth in the existing order of things is not a footpath as narrow as that leading through the eye of the needle, but a highway broad enough to accommodate all manner of hopeful folk.
True, wealth and income is a taboo subject in polite society–i.e., society inhibited by the wealth–ignorance of the rich. Wealth statistics in the United States today are almost as crude as mortality statistics before Pasteur forced medicine to become a science. Wealth is virtually never defined but left to one’s own perception.
Our political leaders and their conventional economic advisors evidence a “mechanical concern” with wealth and income distribution, an unfortunate “distributionist mentality” which has afflicted conventional economics since Ricardo. This mode of thinking is “forever counting the ranks of rich and poor and assaying the defects of capitalism that keep the poor always with us in such great numbers.” Poverty body counts give the rich a bad image by implying that wealth creates poverty. But most menacing, they impute that the system is unfair, that the deck is stacked. Thus, the distributionist mentality “strikes at the living heart of democratic capitalism (sic).” It challenges “the golden rule of capitalism.”
Conventional economists regret that even the great champions of capitalism such as Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and even Milton Friedman, have not seen fit to give “capitalism a theology” or even “assign to its results any assurance of justice.” Their praise has been pragmatic and technical. Capitalism is good because it produces more wealth and liberty than its competitors. None of these defenders “cogently refutes the thesis that the greatest of capitalists–the founders of the system–were in some sense ‘robber barons.’ None convincingly demonstrates that the system succeeds and thrives because it gives room for the heroic creativity of entrepreneurs.”
Students of monopoly capitalism have long observed the tendency of this system to confirm one of the Bible’s many double-entry bookkeeping truths, Matthew 25:29, which promises: “Unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be given, and he shall be taken away even that which he hath.” This is the golden rule of plutocracy. He who owns the economy’s productive capital today will own even more tomorrow, thanks to conventional business finance. And he or she who does not own productive capital, but who must make his productive input through labor, will be robbed of his or her little labor productiveness by the technological change, which eliminates him or her and makes productive capital owners even more productive. But though it fits the facts, this golden rule is not calculated to vindicate the ways of plutocracy to man. They are eager to portray the rich not only as wealth-bearers, but as wealth-creators and wealth-dispensers. This is the golden rule of capitalism.
The sad and disturbing reality today is that conventional economist continue to be intellectually dishonest and sycophantic as in to propagate stall-tactics on behalf of the plutocracy to suppress the spread of productive capital ownership to the 95 to 99 percent of consumers in the United States economy who do not own it now.
There is little in conventional economists thinking, dialogue and publishing to suggest “How can we eliminate the effects of poverty?,” with the question of the capital-hoarding right, namely: “What can we do to revitalize the productive system?”, much less to answer it. In exposing many of the artful errors of the liberals, conventional economists, perhaps not intentionally, have undertaken to build a fortress around the institutions and policies that support the Divine Right of the Rich to Stay Rich and Get Richer, and to preserve the non-ownership of productive capital by the overwhelming majority.
John D. Rockefeller stated the golden rule of capitalism message far more honestly, and certainly more succinctly, in 1905. To a reporter who asked him how he became rich, he replied:
“I believe the power to make money is a gift from God…to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money, and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/07/romney_takes_you_didnt_build_that_global.php?ref=fpblg
