Class

We have become a tender culture. We can be so upset.

So I am embarrassed to say that I was recently really offended by a T-shirt. I guess "offended" is too passive. I was mad.

In 2011, “We are the 99 per cent” became a unifying slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement. In 2013, the U.S. President Barack Obama described income inequality as the “defining challenge of our time”.

A year later, Pope Francis called for a “legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the state,” while leftwing economist Thomas Piketty tried to supply the movement for greater income equality with intellectual ammunition in his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Recently The New York Times ran an article entitled Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!.

According to Jason Barker, an associate professor of philosophy at Kyung Hee University in South Korea and author of the novel Marx Returns, “educated liberal opinion is today more or less unanimous in its agreement that Marx’s basic thesis – that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labour of the working-class majority as profit – is correct”.

One must remember there is an implication here. Some may not want to be altruistic. Some might want to keep his farm or his car or his ship. And the NYT and the academics can glibly talk about Marx without getting into the specifics. But the specifics are that those who have, must surrender what the others want. Period. And there are only a few ways such a surrender, such a redistribution, can occur; it can occur with permission or without it. And without it means by force. And everybody seems to think this is just fine.

Well, maybe not everybody.

The Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker, for example, has examined income inequality at considerable length in his recent book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Pinker questioned many of the rationales for treating income inequality as the “defining challenge of our time” and concluded that “income inequality is not a fundamental component of well-being”.
And new and extensive studies have revealed that there is actually no causation between income inequality and unhappiness.

The market economy is not a zero-sum game, where someone’s gain must come at someone else’s expense. The growth of Western economies have certainly shown the diffusely creative and generative power of wealth.

“The rich get richer and the poor get poorer” is a synopsis of the socialist critique of the market system, implying the perceived inevitability of what Marx called the Law of Increasing Poverty. It is also a myth unsupported by empirical evidence.

 

But freedom and its attendant Capitalism has some problems. You are free to err; your investment or your farm may fail.

“Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin,” the American economist Alan H. Meltzer once put it. “It doesn’t work.”

So freedom, and capitalism, have risks.

Which brings me to my evil t-shirt. I was in Whole Foods and saw a guy in a t-shirt that said, "The Only Good War Is A Class War." He was no child; he was old enough to know better. Advocating class war, a tenet of Marxism, is similar to advocating Nazism or slavery on a t-shirt. Only it's worse; "class war" is overtly homicidal. It does not advocate conflict, it advocates murder and extermination. The property class in Marxism has not had better luck or better accents; the property class is a phase in evolution--like the wolf, an evil, predatory phase that needs to be destroyed. And extirpated. The group needs to be wiped out and its members torn out by their roots and burnt as a holocaust to history. Deracinated. The Marxist are not exaggerating. They did it wherever they could, including the children, infants and fetuses of the enemy class.

The idea is that a person, because of his job, or his education or his parents is your mortal enemy. Enemy. And should die. Die. Reloading over the struggling bodies of the dying Romanov teenagers was not an aberration, it was policy.

There is a risk in open-mindedness. Tolerance can become indifference. But no one should be indifferent to something like that.