Point of View: Enough Already

    God forbid that the super-rich should pay at the same rate as the middle class — a terrible thing for investment, never mind the fact that businesses are said to be flush with cash and that a slight hike in the upper rate in the Clinton years produced no slowdown at all.

    The fact is there are many in this country with more than enough and too many with less than enough. You can call it class warfare if you want, though doing so is specious because the war, as it were, was long ago won by the wealthy — down through the ages, in fact. The plebeians, as far as I know, have never run the show for very long. Yes, occasionally a man of the people gets in, only either to be assassinated or suborned by the ruling class or by his own lust for power.

    Someone said the other day that this country had been more amenable to the creation of wealth — and to the attendant disparities — than Europe because of its “no taxation without representation” birthing cry. Well, the rich nowadays are well represented — overrepresented probably — by those who lobby for them, and by the congressmen whose campaigns they influence.

    It’s not as if anyone’s trotting out Dr. Guillotine’s efficient device on the Mall — there’s simply been a call for some fairness. I think the chances of the 20 million poor in this country rising up and throwing off the corporate yoke are within the range of what you could have expected in Friday’s satellite fallout, one or so in two trillion.

    (Note to Kathy: If I was one of those hit, go with it anyway. It will serve as a fitting envoi for an innumerate ironist.)

    Is not fairness one of our founding principles too? As in all for one, one for all? Recently, the vast majority of those surveyed — Republicans and Democrats alike — thought the pie chart in which the upper fifth controlled 84 percent of the wealth (ours) belonged to a third world country, and that Sweden’s, in which the upper fifth controlled 36 percent of the wealth, was America’s.

    Fine then, let’s work toward that end. Stop sticking our military arms into hornet’s nests, stop paying chief executive officers at rates an obscene number of times that of their companies’ workers, stop bashing unions (which produced a middle class in this country that bought the things it made, thus promoting stability), stop worshipping false idols, and stop putting up with all the malarkey.