What am I talking about? Well, the fact that the more left leaning ideas take hold and drive policy and living in a country, the harder hit the middle class becomes. From the UK Spectator article we get:
To Voltaire, the British class system could be summed up in a sentence. The people of these islands, he said, ‘are like their own beer; froth on top, dregs at bottom, the middle excellent’. A harsh judgment, perhaps, but one that might still have some truth in it today. Yes, we have horrible poverty in our council estates and toffery on our country estates. But Britain is a country that has always taken pride in what we think of as middle-class virtues — hard work, honesty, thrift and self-help.
Today, however, we are witnessing the strange death of the middle class. In Britain, as in the United States, it isn’t just being squeezed — it is actually shrinking and sinking. This is the most disturbing social change of our age and will probably dominate your children’s lives. The lifestyle that the average earner had half a century ago — reasonably sized house, dependable healthcare, a decent education for the children and a reliable pension — is becoming the preserve of the rich. Middle-class pensioners look on amazed at how their children, now into adulthood, seem to have a far harder time.
Just as Britain has an unwritten constitution, so the values of the middle class have been tacitly understood — even if they have proven difficult to define. ‘England,’ declared the Liberal MP Charles Masterman in 1909, ‘is the tone and temper which the ideals and determinations of the middle class has stamped upon it.’ Advocating the Great Reform Act, Lord Brougham put it even better. ‘By the people, I mean the middle classes,’ he said, ‘the wealth and intelligence of the country. The glory of the British name.’ The Conservative party, when it has been most successful, has sought to define and champion the middle class — or, more importantly, its ideals. David Cameron tries, still, now and again. His government, he likes to say, is on the side of ‘hard-working people who do the right thing’.
I have to admit I had me a hearty laugh at the author inability to make the connection that the middle class has been shrinking and suffering precisely because of the policies and economic and social incentives that the left, which he claims is the champion of said middle class, has been implementing in the last 5 decades, supposedly to help the middle class out. Sure the left claims, and might even believe, that these policies are intended to help the middle class, which when looked at from an emotional perspective, the need to press social justice on a world that seems unwilling to do so on its own, but the facts show that these policies are directly responsible for the erosion of the middle class.
When we reward bad behavior, always under the guise of helping those that have been afflicted by some misfortune or another, and pretending that the actor’s choices or lack of choices are not practically always the reason for the misfortune, we are only encouraging more of it. The big nanny state that the left so loves and pretends is needed to protect the poor and middle class, has weaseled its way into everything. We now reward people having kids outside of marriage. We encourage kids to rack up tens, of thousands in debt pursuing whatever fancy they want, and call what oft amounts to nonsensical PC brainwashing a serious education, while the most important skill to succeed – the ability to think and reason – are destroyed by the PC agenda to force conformity. You bought a house that you could not afford, or took so many loans out against that mortgage that when things got bad you found yourself under water and unable to swim? Let’s pretend the fault is solely someone else’s and encourage you to keep doing more of the same. You didn’t save for retirement and are counting on an unsustainable government scheme – one that would for all intents and purposes land anyone in the private sector that tried to do the same thing in jail – that has running in the red decades ahead of predictions, and is unlikely to survive unless a more onerous tax burden is placed on the constantly shrinking productive part of our society to pay for that? Don’t worry! Other people that were not as stupid as you will have their saving raided to help you out. And let us not forget the promise of an impossible to sustain system of “free healthcare” for all that in Britain is already entrenched and a miserable failure, and in the US something the left wants to emulate, because they see it as the best gateway to more quickly and effectively allow them to both expand their power and get their hands on trillions of dollars. That’s not going to cause anyone pain.
The reality is that the left talks a mean talk about caring for people, but in the end all their actions to correct whatever injustice – and they see everything as an injustice because they have all been told that we all need to cross the finish line at the same time and with the same toys or life is unfair – they see amount to nothing but an assault on the middle class. Leviathan needs money to buy votes and keep picking winners & losers. The middle class has been bled to increase the ranks of the poor on government assistance and to pay off the those wealthy and selected few in favor with the political class. The connected rich get richer while those in the middle class trying to get there are hamstrung at every opportunity by government fiat to control entry to that elite level. In the meantime the lower class, those with their hands out, is grown constantly, because the left’s elite knows that’s where the guaranteed vote comes from.
It’s not an accident that the marxist or fascist state consisted of the elite few at the top and the serfs livening at a mediocre level of subsistence, if they were that lucky, and more likely than not, in shared poverty and misery, because that’s the natural order for that system. There isn’t much difference between the nanny state and the old feudal systems of old. Yeah, they would like you to believe otherwise, but that’s bullshit. The masters and how obvious the fact is that they are our masters have changed, and it is no longer cool to refer to the lower class as serfs, even if that’s really what they are, but the nanny state is the same thing in a nutshell. Sure, government now appears more benign because unlike the old feudal lords that only took our modern government has worked hard to cultivate the appearance that it is the one giving away, but it’s not giving away anything of its own: it is giving away what it confiscates, through the same onerous taxation systems the feudal lords employed, from others.
This system always will support 2 classes: the elite and well off, and the others. No room for a middle class. And that’s why the middle class is going the way of the Dodo bird. Figuring this out is no rocket science, but these people don’t want to admit they are the culprits. Hence articles like this one where they express such confusion at why the middle class is perishing despite the fact they are doing so much for it. Heh!