On slow news days – especially
when the state legislature is out of session and everyman’s
life, liberty and property is a bit safer from despoliation – some
newspaper in Connecticut is bound to run a story on the state’s “wealth gap,”
the always intolerable difference between the assets of Greenwich hedge fund
managers and city dwellers hedged about by poverty, crime and cultural
dissolution.
The wealth gap in
Connecticut is large because the poor, despite years of Great Society programs,
are still poor, and the rich are still rich. Quick now: Which has been the
least successful national policy, the war on drugs or the war on poverty? The
stairway connecting Heaven, Connecticut’s upstairs, and Hell, the state’s
downstairs, is long but gilded at the top. The underlying assumption of all
such stories is that the poor are poor BECAUSE the rich are rich. It follows
that if a compassionate government were able to even the scales by
redistributing wealth from rich Paul to poor Peter, life would be more
equitable and just and, as an incidental benefit, there would be fewer wealth
gap stories. No one on the distribution end of the war on poverty seems to
notice that poverty and the wealth gap march forward in tandem.
The truth is that
the poor we shall always have with us -- see Mark 14:7. Here in the United
States, we used to be able to provide a ladder that would allow the poor or
their children to climb out of poverty and join a burgeoning middle class. The
poor did not move from war-stricken Europe in the World War II and post war
period to remain poor; here it was possible for the energetic poor to exchange
their labor for a boost in status. Jobs were plentiful; cultural disapprobation
and the sting of poverty inspired the poor to make painful sacrifices, work
hard and save money, so that their children might be rewarded with the
blessings of a hard won prosperity. The so called “melting pot” really did
integrate and uplift the poor. And while the poor, we knew, would always be
with us, the SAME poor were not always with us – until the inauguration of
Great Society programs.
The same was true of
the rich: Old fortunes were lost or frittered away; new fortunes arose. Status
itself changed from generation to generation. In “America, America,” Elia Kazan’s most autobiographical film, two
boys coming to America from Anatolia, then in the iron grip of corrupt and
vicious Turks, watch the State of Liberty glide by their boat. In their
oppression, they had dreamed great dreams of liberty and self-reliance. Their
uncle, who remained behind, talked to them daily of the glory that was America.
One of them, racked by memories of villagers brutalized and Christian churches
burned by the Turks, suddenly realizes – “America is not even a country. It is
an emotive idea.”
So comes the brutalized
immigrant – to nestle in the center of this explosive idea.
Whether or not we
always shall have the rich with us depends upon what we mean by “rich” and “us.”
It is by no means certain that Connecticut will always have a “Gold Coast”
populated by what modern progressives consider the indolent and conspicuous
rich. Unlike the poor, the rich have wings on their feet.
Joseph Stalin,
“Breaker of Nations,” knew this; and so, in the fullness of time following the
Communist Revolution, he imposed equality on Russia by expropriating the wealth
of the rich and near rich. Under Communist jackboots, very wealthy Russians had
already departed or voluntarily surrendered their wealth to the party they
eagerly joined. Stalin then re-positioned the resisting middle class in what later
became a vast Gulag Archipelago, the great ashcan of the Marxist-Leninist view
of history. In so doing, Stalin killed wealth creation in Russia for
generations, but he more than satisfied what Friedrich Nietzsche might have
called, had he lived to see it, the ressentiment of
ruling class Communists.
Pushed forward by lazy
journalists, wealth gap stories nearly write themselves. The underlying
assumption of all such stories is wearyingly the same: The poor are not, cannot
be, and will never be self-reliant or fully integrated into the general culture
– until a compassionate centralized government provides for their needs by
moving wealth from the idle rich to the oppressed poor. The great “melting pot”
of America once melted not only cultural and language differences but poverty
as well, but no more. While the war on poverty has failed, the attack on property, liberty, self-reliance, assimilation and upward mobility has succeeded
all too well.
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