Most conservatives believe in the free market, saying it’s better than the government butting in. I have a different take as a Depression-era youngster when FDR was president. The free market gradually was set aside then, and government gradually took on practices that better fit the words, “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Author and journalist Paul Roberts said it more frankly: “Free market is a cover story for the horror of an extractive, asset-stripping operation by publicly supported banks and the governments that they control that impoverishes people and the environment.”
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew that capitalism, under financial tycoons like John D. Rockefeller, had cornered the majority of the nation’s wealth, something that has now happened again. Democracy still was claimed but actually had been set aside. Roosevelt very gradually brought it back.
As only one example, infrastructure needed to be repaired, as is the case today. A change is necessary, and we should not set it aside further.
Today the same conditions exist as occurred during the Depression years. Wealth has been and is steadily being shifted to the upper financial class; and our highways, water lines, bridges, etc., are in need of repair. The very top tycoons keep gaining financially, paying less in taxes and bribing congressmen (via campaign contributions) for favors. Meanwhile, the lower-income folks are receiving increasingly less.
That doesn’t seem moral and democratic to me.
Why does this consistently worsen? One aspect was the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which allows unlimited contributions by the wealthy elite to control elections. Bribery is a crude term in the minds of many people, but folks in my Depression youth would have said, “Let’s call a spade a spade.”
Undemocratic things are being done in several ways. Government officials are influenced by money as are the tycoons who have cornered so much of it. Money is persuasive. And so our government now is, without shame, favoring the upper crust. Taxes are lowered, subsidies are increased and taxes are altered; folks with sufficient money can study the laws carefully, or hire those who can, and can take advantage. A simple classification of laws has become a complex puzzle that requires much study — and that can be rigged by folks with money.
Let’s stop that. As a starting point, more citizens must vote.
We also need to gradually, as FDR did, move in the opposite direction, acting so “of the people, by the people and for the people” actually guides us.
The Revolutionary War freed us from the control of royalty. But now we have brought about a royalty of our own making. Corporations have that power. Each corporate board is charged by its major stockholders with increasing profit, market share, growth and stock price. They have succeeded immensely, and we need to shift this movement that is burying our democracy.
This was written by retired professor Bernie Hughes from the University of Wisconsin Superior. I think he hits the nail on the head.
