Has the Time Come for Democratization of the Economy?

December 21, 2015
Has the Time Come for Democratization of the Economy?

by Lawrence Wittner

A study released at the beginning of December by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) reported that America’s 20 wealthiest individuals own more wealth than roughly half the American population combined—152 million people. The startling level of economic inequality in the United States is also highlighted by Forbes, which recently observed that the richest 400 Americans possess more wealth than 62 percent of the American public—192 million people. Furthermore, these studies apparently underestimate the concentration of wealth in the United States, for the use of offshore tax havens and legal trusts conceals trillions of dollars that the richest Americans have amassed for themselves and their families.

Ironically, the United States has long been depicted as a land of economic equality, with widespread prosperity. Writing from Monticello in 1814, Thomas Jefferson emphasized America’s difference from class-divided Europe. “The great mass of our population is of laborers; our rich . . . being few, and of moderate wealth,” he declared. “Most of the laboring classes possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich . . . such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families.” In the early twentieth century, Werner Sombart, a German economist and sociologist, argued that, in the United States, “socialistic Utopias . . . are sent to their doom” on “the reefs of roast beef and apple pie.” The “American Dream” of economic opportunity for all has constantly been invoked, sometimes to avoid a more equitable sharing of the wealth and, at other times, to advance it.

Nevertheless, the reality of life in the United States has often fallen short of the American Dream. Certainly, American slaves and their descendants didn’t consume much of the roast beef. And there was also substantial economic misery and class strife among other portions of the American population, who labored long hours in factories and mines, experienced high levels of industrial accidents, endured frequent layoffs and unemployment, and lived in squalid slums. What led, at times, to some degree of economic leveling was not a voluntary sharing of the wealth by the richest Americans but, rather, economic struggles by unions and public policy breakthroughs secured by progressive politicians.

But, with union strength declining and progressive politics in retreat since the 1980s, economic inequality in the United States has grown by leaps and bounds. In the 1970s, America’s wealthiest 0.1 percent—the richest one-thousandth of the population—owned 7 percent of U.S. household wealth. Today, that figure has risen to 20 percent—about as much wealth as is possessed, in total, by the bottom 90 percent of Americans.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/21/has-the-time-come-for-democratization-of-the-economy/