TAKE A look at American society. Imagine yourself looking down from Mars. What do you see?
In the United States, there are professed values like democracy. In a democracy, public opinion is going to have some influence on policy, and then the government carries out actions determined by the population. That’s what democracy means.
It’s important to understand that privileged and powerful sectors have never liked democracy and for very good reasons. Democracy puts power into the hands of the general population and takes it away from the privileged and the powerful. It’s a principle of concentration of wealth and power.
Concentration of wealth yields concentration of power, particularly so as the cost of elections skyrockets, which forces the political parties even more deeply into the pockets of major corporations. This political power quickly translates into legislation that increases the concentration of wealth. So fiscal policy, like tax policy, deregulation, rules of corporate governance, and a whole variety of measures—political measures designed to increase the concentration of wealth and power—yields more political power to do the same thing. And that’s what we’ve been seeing. So we have this kind of “vicious cycle” in progress.
I mean, the wealthy always did have an inordinate amount of control over policy. Actually, that goes back centuries. It is so traditional that it was described by Adam Smith in 1776. You read the famous Wealth of Nations. He says, in England, “the principal architects of policy” are the people who own the society—in his day, “merchants and manufacturers.” And they make sure that their own interests are very well cared for, however “grievous” the impact on the people of England, or others. Now it’s not merchants and manufacturers, it’s financial institutions and multinational corporations. The people who Adam Smith called the “masters of mankind”—and they’re following “the vile maxim,” “All for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.” They’re just going to pursue policies that benefit them and harm everyone else.
Well, that’s a pretty general maxim of politics that’s been studied closely in the United States. Those are the policies that have increasingly been followed, and in the absence of a general popular reaction, that’s pretty much what you’d expect.