The New York Times published
an essay by Michael Tomasky concerning this litmus test introduced by
MSNBC referred to in
the previous post. It involves confronting each candidate with the
question of whether they are capitalists or socialists. As stated
earlier, it has become vogue in the media to begin the
interrogatories with this question as if there were no other than a
binary choice.
Tomasky, who is
currently a columnist for The Daily Beast and
editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, as
well as a contributing opinion writer contributed a piece in today's
Times congratulating
South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg's handling of the question. (1)
“Pete Buttigieg,” writes
Tomasky, “who's shown an impressive knack for putting
matters well in these early days of the 2020 presidential race,
nailed it recently when Chuck Todd of NBC asked him about capitalism.
Of course I'm a capitalist, he said; America 'is a capitalist
society.'
“But, he continued: 'It's got to be democratic
capitalism.'
“Mr. Buttigieg said that when capitalism becomes
unrestrained by democratic checks and impulses, that's no longer the
kind of capitalism that once produced broad prosperity in this
country. 'And if you want to see what happens when you have capitalism
without democracy, you can see it very clearly in Russia,' he said.
'It turns into crony capitalism, and that turns into an oligarchy.”
(2)
Precisely, although the
United States has never been a purely capitalist society. It began
with a largely slaveholding economy and has morphed into a rather
mixed economy. Even in the heyday, as noted in previous posts,
governments, state and federal, heavily subsidized and protected
through tariffs major industries. But the good mayor of South Bend
might have added, as regards emerging Oligarchy, that we have already
arrived.
Tomasky then takes us
through a brief, though incomplete, history lesson. He invokes,
quite rightly, the example of Thomas Jefferson who within months of
penning the Declaration of Independence was
busy writing legislation in the Virginia House of Delegates
abolishing the Commonwealth's medieval laws concerning “entail”
and “primogeniture”,
which served to keep great
estates in tact upon the death of the principle, ensuring a dominance
of the few landed aristocrats spanning generations.
“Was it mere coincidence
Tomasky asks, “that he moved quickly from writing the
founding document of democracy to writing a bill abolishing
inheritance laws brought over from England?”
“Hardly,”
Tomasky answers. “He believed, as the founders did
generally, that excess inherited wealth was fundamentally
incompatible with democracy”.(3)
Tomasky then proceeds to cite John Adams: “All
elements of society, he once wrote, must 'cooperate in this one
democratical principle, that the end of all government is the
happiness of the People; and in this other, that the greatest
happiness of the greatest Number is the point to be obtained.'
'Happiness' to the founders meant economic well-being, and note that
Adams called it 'democratical'”. (4)
Tomasky even evokes Adam Smith, the political economist
who founded modern Capitalism and one “whom conservatives invoke
constantly today but who would in fact be appalled by the
propagandistic phrase 'death tax'--in their time, inherited wealth
was the oppressive economic problem” (5)
He is quite right in his reporting, although incomplete.
Smith would argue that large concentrations of wealth passed from
generation to generation would stifle initiative, ossify markets and
strangle innovation. This is precisely what is happening in the
United States as large big-box operations drive out small town
merchants, killing off the old main streets and nightly vacuuming the
proceeds out of town, leaving communities with only the starvation
wages paid to workers. Even that isn't enough for the likes of the
Walton's who build their stores on the backs of their labor force and
at taxpayer expense to the tune, on average, of a million dollars a
year in tax breaks and social services. The question facing any
budding entrepreneur is: would you risk your life savings on a
hardware, grocery store, clothing or any of a number of retail
opportunities on the chance that they drop a big box down next to you
and take your business? Of course not. And the numbers show. Not
only has main street suffered but fewer of the young are going into
business or plan to go into business than at any time in the last
century. The markets are being stifled as the likes of Walmart and
Amazon take over retail. This bodes ill for the greater society.
But let's get back to the founding fathers. Like Smith
they would and indeed did support taxation. And, as mentioned in an
early post in these columns, Madison, Hamilton and Jay argued in The
Federalist Papers for taxation to be based primarily on property
rather than a poll or head tax precisely because it was, for the
time, the most progressive form of taxation. That is, the
wealthier you were in those days the more property you owned since
wealth was largely tied to land.
These points are best understood by reading Arthur
Schlesinger's The Age of Jackson. Not only Jefferson and, as
Tomasky reports, Adams deeply concerned with concentrations of wealth
but so were the Masons and Lees of Virginia along with Patrick Henry,
Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.
This was no mere coincidence as any cursory reading of
The Federalist Papers reveals. The founders were serious
students of history and references to the ancient regimes of Athens
and Rome as well as medieval experiments in republican government
populate the pages. The closely studied how these republics were
constituted and what they came to understand were the reasons for
their failure.
And that brings us back to where Tomasky began, his
reference—albeit brief—to Aristotle.
Tomasky mentions the Greek philosopher only in passing,
a nod that Aristotle defined the Oligarchy implying disapproval.
There was more to it than that. What he should have acknowledged is
that Aristotle who was, in a manner of speaking 'present at
creation,' was a democrat because he witnessed how oppressive were
the concentration of wealth. What Tomasky failed to mention—because
he didn't do his homework and it isn't taught in American schools—is
that the Greeks invented democracy not simply to give the citizen
power but to give the citizen power so as to bring to heel the
Oligarchy. It was to achieve these ends—the happiness of
the People—through wealth redistribution that democracy was created
in the first place. This is why the rich are always, at base,
anti-democratic, and this is why the lessons of history are not
taught in the schools.
Please note that happiness here is not meant to
be seen as the happiness of the individual. It was Adams who first
laid down the dictum of “the greatest good for the greatest number”
in explaining what was meant, a refrain echoed a century later back
across the Atlantic by Jeremy Bentham as England struggled to rid
itself of the old medieval order. It is the happiness of the
“People” further underscored by the preamble to the Constitution
in which the founders charged the new order with, among other things,
providing for the “General Welfare”.
Tomasky is, however, quite right arguing as he does that
the understanding of democracy as given to us by our schoolmarms must
change. The “word has come to mean the existence and exercise
of a few basic rights and principle. The people—the 'demos'--are
imbued with no particular economic characteristic. This is wrong.
Our definition of democracy needs to change.” (6)
Until then the Russian and American Oligarchies sleep
well when they aren't up all night scheming of ways to give the
screws another turn.
“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh'
Impeach and Imprison
_________________
- Tomasy, Michael. “America's Coming Oligarchy” The New York Times. Monday, April 15, 2019. Page A23
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
