I’ve mentioned this before, but Capitalism has a self-destructive tendency to concentrate wealth and power at the top, leading eventually to economic collapse because the only people with purchasing power are a few very rich people. Progressives wish to correct this tendency through support for labor, reasonable regulations and progressive income tax rates. This ensures that gains from economic progress are shared by all.
Furthermore: In an unrestrained Capitalism, this concentrated wealth equates to the concentration of economic, social, political and cultural power in the hands of an elite minority. Such is absolutely antithetical any notion of democratic governance or meaningful conception of individual rights and liberty – after all, what is to prevent the 1% from saying, “advocating for anything that threatens our dominance will render you all but unemployable.” Yes, you’re “free” to speak your mind, but if doing so results in economic ruination, are you truly possessing “free speech?”
This is what FDR referred to as “economic royalism” and what Lincoln and others described as the “money power”, an intentional reference to the term “the slave power.”
Resolved: We can either have “government of the people, by the people and for the people”, or we can have government of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy. We can’t have both.
Discuss.
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