A century ago, in the incomparable 1912 campaign for the White House – former President Roosevelt, sitting President Taft, and President-to-be Wilson in pitched battle – they made a contribution to history that falls heavily on the 21st century. They got the economic message RIGHT.
The message was as plain as the earth itself: Wealth is like manure. Keep it in piles, and its value is lost. Spread it, and it grows many good things.
It can be traced to the inspiration of steel-magnate-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and his timeless essay, “The Gospel of Wealth.” The responsibility and power of capitalism to regenerate itself, to nurture the consumer economics and middle classes on which it feeds, was never captured more insightfully, nor in fewer worlds, than when he said, “The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.”
So where are these messages in the campaign of 2012? Surely they are lost on the One Percent, with a few exceptions. They want no part of the wealth sharing of fairer taxes. Shamelessly, they are bent upon killing all estates taxes, to enable their offspring to live in the careless opulence they’re accustomed to, denuding the earth as they go.
And, how about today’s economists, will the profession ever outgrow its fame as “the dismal science?” Or put to rest President Truman’s wish for “a one-armed economist?” When will the left hand and the right hand grasp reality together, thus finding a firm stand?
American economics and politics have become so interlaced today by corporate power that the ideals of Carnegie and trust-busting Teddy are easily ignored. They’ve been replaced by class warfare, in which the well-heeled media too easily pretend the rich are not at fault. Class warfare is always rooted in wealth, because it’s a blame game that only money can win. It’s a smokescreen for the huge carbon footprints that wealth and the corporate world are making.
No less ironic has been the inability of the Obama White House to grow hay in such fertile ground. Is this White House too much staffed in Ivy League elitists and their meandering economists?
The President could seize the high ground on reelection simply by steadily reminding the One Percent that capitalism only grows when it spreads wealth more than it concentrates it. Our enormous national debt is our reward for living the game the other way around in the three decades since the Reagan White House raised the false hope that all ships would rise with the “trickle down” from accelerated spending bound to come from greater concentration of wealth. It didn’t, and won’t. Trickle down is so fundamentally unAmerican. Democracy lives from the bottom up, not the top down.
On class warfare, the One Percent “protesteth too much,” yet they cannot escape responsibility for it. Sadly, the media have taken it too lightly, but the president can’t afford to. With job markets and the middle class stalled, and hope shrinking, “trickle down” could not be deader. It’s the President’s job to finish burying it. It’s the message the Ninety-nine Percent have been pining for. They’d not only grasp it, they’d run with it, and run hard.
– Frank Mensel, September 2012