Greedy Is As Greedy Does

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/tim-gurner-australian-ceo-unemployment-video-rcna104957

>Tim Gurner wants you to be miserable. Yes, you.

Speaking at the Australian Financial Review’s “property summit,” the property developer and CEO — net worth $584 million — complained that the country’s 3.7% unemployment rate was, in fact, a problem. “We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, 50%,” said Gurner, because “arrogant” workers aren’t productive enough for his liking. “We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.”<

He did apologize for these comments later. However, I am convinced he was only apologizing for having been foolish enough to say it publicly and being caught in  being truthful. I think he was being honest and completely sincere in his original statement rather than in his apology.

And his attitude is not a rare one among the privileged and entitled class. >According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of the wealthiest Americans believe the “poor have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”<

It is attitudes like this which are all too common among the wealthy, which drove Marx and Engels to create their poisonous manifesto. And therein lies the old teeter totter problem. An excess of wrong on one side of the teeter totter is not balanced by an excess of opposing  wrong on the other side.  Well regulated capitalism is highly beneficial to everyone in a society. Unrestricted capitalist warfare and greed are destructive.

When you think about it, it's really quite obvious. The poor are desperate and don't create a stable society in their desperation because desperate people do desperate things.  The wealthy care only about themselves and will gut and cannibalize the society they live in in order to make themselves wealthier than they already are.  The middle class is stable and mutually beneficial to society as a whole.

Aristotle was well aware of this over two millennia ago. His Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics explored this issue:

>Aristotle pointed out that if the middle class disappears, then the poor will become the majority. The poor tend to be less educated than the rich, and they tend to struggle just to make ends meet. If the poor are the majority, then in a democracy they will vote to take away the money from the rich!

So, what are the rich to do?

Well, do away with democracy of course! Democracy, at that point, becomes too much of a threat to the elite, and the elite start taking steps to limit the power of government. (Moves to limit voting by the poor, anyone?)

Therefore, as the middle class disappears, democracy disappears with it.

On the other hand, with a MAJORITY middle class, democracy works, and it works well. Why? Because the middle class tends to be educated and has just enough prosperity that members of that class can see themselves becoming rich some day, so they don’t punish the rich, and they have compassion for the poor, being that many of them came from poverty. The middle class stands between the two extremes, the poor and the rich, and you end up with a well functioning democracy.

Here Aristotle describes just that in his book Politics:

The best constitution is one controlled by a numerous middle class which stands between the rich and the poor. For those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation find it “easiest to obey the rule of reason” (Politics IV.11.1295b4–6). They are accordingly less apt than the rich or poor to act unjustly toward their fellow citizens.< -- stanford.edu

This matters to us because our middle class has been steadily shrinking since the days of Ronald Reagan. That is because the middle class is being cannibalized by the ultra wealthy who want desperately poor people who will work for incredibly low wages so that the excessively wealthy can become even more excessively wealthy.

Remember what we're supposed to be doing in this country? 

-- We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.--

This is what a middle-class can do. This is what the poor would like to do, but in their desperation cannot do.  This is what the wealthy absolutely refuse to do because only their own interests matter to them.