Hating the rich is not envy; it's defending Democracy
So what if a very few people have such enormous sums? These expensive
excesses of food, wine and art don’t really affect regular people like
you and me. But it turns out that the distortions caused by the excesses
of the ultra-wealthy affect all of us a lot.
Take the housing market. You may have noticed headlines like the following: Hedge funds crowd first-time buyers out of housing market or How Big Institutional Money Distorts Housing Prices.
If you live in certain areas of the country, like the San Francisco Bay
Area, rents are soaring and it is unimaginable that you might ever
purchase a place to live. The ultra-wealthy are purchasing houses by the
hundreds to be rented out
Then, of course, comes the usual next
step when the ultra-wealthy are involved: they use their wealth and
power to get things the rest of us can’t. One frequent example is
demands for tax cuts.
SNIP
This worship of the ultra-wealthy is manifested in policies
that give privileges to the rich the rest of us don’t receive. The
principle of one-person-one-vote gives way to power and our society
eventually becomes ruled by the principle of one-dollar-one-vote.
Examples
of our abandonment of the principles of democracy in favor of
more-for-the-wealthier include the change from “high-occupancy
lanes” where cars with two or three people can bypass traffic jams to
toll lanes, where drivers who have more money can purchase the right to
bypass traffic jams. We also experience this when we see first-class
passengers allowed to bypass the long security lines at airports.
In a recent NY Times op-ed, The Extra Legroom Society,
Frank Bruni writes about how people of greater wealth can purchase the
right to board a plane earlier, even the right to bypass lines or make
others wait while they go around again for rides at amusement parks.
While these are examples of businesses, not our government, introducing
tiers for the wealthier, they show how Americans have come to accept
that people with more money should be allowed to bypass them.
Bruni
writes, “But lately, the places and ways in which Americans are
economically segregated and stratified have multiplied, with
microclimates of exclusivity popping up everywhere. The plane mirrors
the sports arena, the theater, the gym. Is it any wonder that class
tensions simmer?”
These are a few examples of the excesses the
super-wealthy indulge in, along with examples of ways their super-wealth
harms the rest of us. There are far more examples in evidence these
days. Our democracy—the ability of We the People to make our own
decisions about how we should be governed—is what is really at stake as
more and more wealth accumulates among fewer and fewer people.
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