Tarry,
Thank you for your response to my comments. I share the anger and pessimism that you register, and the frustration at watching what seems to be a slow motion train wreck.
I’ve had moments of bleak despair in recent months, and it takes a conscious effort to avoid it. However, I also know from our history that our system has some extraordinary capacities for recovery. We have to use the system. It seems that we don’t have time for legislative solutions, but what other ones are there? We certainly don’t want to risk a constitutional convention.
Politically, it is useful to see our current crisis as a crisis of legitimacy–what is the basis of legitimate political power? The historical perspective is useful. About 1900 the nation reunited itself on the basis of white male supremacy. That is, white men, AS WHITE MEN, possessed political sovereignty. That entitlement of white men came apart after World War II. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy realized that fundamental economic change was crucial, but after their deaths no prominent figure grasped the need.
Ronald Reagan exploited the crisis of legitimacy. While his base thought he supported the restoration of white male entitlement, he effectively transferred the basis of political legitimacy to money, corporate and personal, without regard to race or gender. The current situation is a crisis of legitimacy. Money has pretty much blown its claim, but it still has huge power–power and legitimate power are two very different matters.
Politically there are two steps that we need. First, the power of money must be restricted. If the Democrates find the courage to push through health care, that will have immense symbolic value. Any constraints placed on the power of money through control of the financial system witll also have immense value even if it doesn’t do all that we want. Such moves will buy time for the second step.
The second step will be to build a broadly accepted alternative claim to legitimate political power. Obama’s campaign speech in Philadelphia laid down an alternative source of legitimacy–the people, inclusively defined.
The challenge is to articulate the people’s claim in programmatic terms. Those terms have to be a coherent assault on the power of money. The estate tax should be radically altered to limit the concentration of wealth. I think that the only intellectually sustainable argument for the estate tax is that any asset accumulation depends on society and therefore it is morally justifiable for society to reclaim substantial portions of those accumulations. Every estate above a minimal amoung–say $100,000–should pay some estate tax, perhaps 2% as an initial amount with a steep curve to something above 50%.
The estate tax shouldn’t be sold as an ”equalizer.” Equality doesn’t sell well, and it gets all caught up in American phobias about individualism, etc. The point isn’t that we are all equal but that democracy cannot exist if inequality becomes excessive. The Declaration of Independence posits human equality as the foundation of popular sovereignty and government, NOT as the goal of government. The job of government is simply to prevent inequality from destroying popular sovereignty.
The Individual Asset Accounts would be a crucial element, the assertion that everyone deserves a minimum capital stake. That isn’t a new idea. It’s been done in more limited yet substantial forms: FHA, Social Security, the GI Bill, the Homestead ACt, subsidies for all kinds of business and professional acitivities.
If you’re still reading, let’s talk further. ahab@oz.net.
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