The state class’ war on the private sector middle class is relatively recent. It’s mostly Marxist now, but the state class predates the socialist management class by millennia, created by royals, not Karl Marx.
Today, having a limited private sector middle class, with a very narrow range of economic choices, defines all of Europe’s social democracies, while it is virtually prohibited in the post-colonial regimes of Africa and Latin America. Americans can’t imagine how limited are the dreams of a small businessman in Europe with a big idea. Bill Gates would still be in his garage. And having worked in west Africa, just trying to teach all the “illegal” things one has to do just to put a few extra bucks in their pockets is frightening. As I have said time and time again, in 80% of the world, free enterprise must be carried out like a covert operation.
All this is not by accident.
And were it not for America it would be much worse, for we are the stuff the world’s dreams are made of.
What the Marxists today, and aristocrats since the beginning of time, all agree is that the middle class must be of the political state class.
What they never, never, never can allow is that a business middle class can arise from within the common class.
Before America such a private sector middle class was never allowed to exist.
What did exist, right up to World War II, was a pie divided less by wealth than by political power. And that power resided in the hands of the political class, all of whom enjoyed the power to say who would live inside the protection of their castle, and who would subsist outside, among the elements.
To the political ruling class the middle class was always the government class; the civil servants, the intellectuals and academicians, the state-approved press, and the licensed businesses who tailored their clothes, tinned their caviar, and banked their money. The state middle class survived only at the sufferance of the prince, and later the Party.
On the other side of the fence, the informal economy that housed, fed and clothed the remaining 90% was organized by what was called the petty bourgeoisie; the butcher, the baker, the candle-stick maker, all just down the street, a short walk from a three story walk-up that, by 1940, marked virtually every urban neighborhood in the world.
Their entire economy was prohibited from ever doing too well. It was a subsistence life Karl Marx insisted capitalism had concocted, but in fact had been around since the Pharaohs.
America changed all that, all because every citizen had the unrestricted freedom to simply have an idea, to go out and start a business, to build a thing, sell a thing, grow a thing, fix a thing, write a thing, then get a bigger house, a bigger car, then start running with the Kiwanis crowd, and even have his picture taken shaking hands with the governor. Eventually, thanks to Ronald Reagan, he was able to invest his excess capital in the stock market, or in new ideas and start-ups just like he had once begun himself. Wealth, new jobs, new opportunities, grew geometrically, not linearly. New money, unlike matter, was created.
Or he could fail. But even then, in America at least, he could pick himself up, dust himself off, and start all over again.
Virtually every new thing, every convenience, every comfort, that the rest of the world now enjoys, began in America. The Germans claim to have invented the automobile, but only one half of one per cent could own one. Henry Ford designed the assembly line so that every one could, including his own workers. A very dangerous idea, both the Marxist and Euros said, for it was the assembly line and the Sears and Roebuck catalog that first caused the world to dream.
It wasn’t that a person could afford one, mind you, but just that they knew it was available, and if they saved, they could buy it.
The private sector invented delayed gratification.
The American private sector is history’s un-managed loose end.
And for the world to be reoriented toward the old laws of stability, all this unfettered freedom has to be stopped. They’ve been going about doing this for forty years, and Obama is believed to represent the hammer that will finally nail the coffin lid shut.
The political bottom line is that the American private sector middle class must be destroyed. It’s like Sammy Davis, Jr used to joke because of his skin color, his one eye and being a Jew…when he walked outside people said “Get him. He’s all of them!”
America is all of their demons.
This is a singular fact that is hard for both Americans and the rest of the world to understand, because, for one, we can’t fathom the notion that after 225 years, we are still the only nation in the history of the world to have a from-the-bootstrap private sector middle class (actually a couple more do now, thanks to us).
The lust, the love, the dreams, that all the world has for America isn’t our Constitution, our military, our purple mountains majesty, our Statue of Liberty, but our private sector opportunities. It was that way in 1870, in 1913, and still is today.
A Note on Capitalism and Property Rights, and who Kneels to Who
Karl Marx declared war on capitalism never foreseeing how it would turn out in America. He totally missed the real “demon seed” in America, property rights, looking at it from the top down, as did Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and now the Obamaistas, who saw only corporate plutocrats and robber barons They missed the reciprocal trickle up of entrepreneurship from the bottom, that would, thanks to Henry Ford and the assembly line, the American GI Bill and the Reagan tax cuts, define a totally different capitalism than the one even GK Chesterton and the Catholic Church decried.
American Capitalism and Property Rights are joined at the hip, but in America capitalism kneels at the feet of individual property rights and the free market, not the other way around. Understand this simple law.
In 1945, millions of men came home from the war, and everyone was offered a free college education. I won’t give you a lecture as to why so many WWII vets took this offer up, while so many Vietnam vets didn’t, just know they did. And that generation of new college grads, by 1950, had entered industry and created a middle management class that completely disproved Marx.
This new management middle class arose alongside an explosion in demand of everything, from babies, housing, food, services, transportation. You name it. A gigantic economic expansion, at a 70% tax rate. And no, those GI Bill degrees weren’t in Underwater Basket Weaving or Cross-dressing, either, but in Engineering, Business, Accounting and Physics.
Because so many new managers, formerly farm boys from Tennessee and bus boys from Queens, were moving up and buying houses and cars, the market had to create niches for their newly acquired tastes…which by 1950 had become the “middle class” as I grew to know it. While the rich still drove their Cadillacs and Lincolns, new lines of Buicks, Oldsmobiles and Mercurys outsold them. New housing areas for the management class, called suburbs, sprouted up, totally unlike the row houses companies built for their factory workers. This was where Beaver and Wally Cleaver and Betty and Bud Anderson lived.
And suddenly local providers of services also rose up, as those homes were the first in town to buy TV sets, (1950) or air conditioners (1960), color TVs, (1963), and new frost free Amanas, Maytags and Hotpoints, all in need of installation, service and repair. Cable came later.
There was nothing like it, and quite frankly, it’s been a barn-burner ever since, to the point now, it is this private sector business class, from corporate middle managers to the guys who come and and install their central air, and their consumption habits, that the entire American capitalist system bows down to.
(When the really big corporations, now in their 2nd-3rd generation, conspire with the government to cut off 20% of this from the bottom, I don’t think they know what they are doing, for that’s a death to trickle-up none of them can survive in the long run. Then they will know who depends on who, and who’s been snookered.)
Than came the Reagan tax cuts, which allowed a whole new class of small business owners to invest, often in themselves; to become entrepreneurs, which I watched a lot of that WWII generation at age 60 do up close. That original GI Bill class of 1949 begin investing their money in entrepreneurial ventures rather than merely saving for retirement, no longer having to fear moving into a higher tax bracket as they did under all the preceding administrations. I knew one man in that period who just topped $100K/yr at age 60, but in the last 10 years of his life went from an estate of approximately $350K to over $3 million.
Since the 1980s, the largest number of new millionaires, and job growth, have come from this burgeoning small business sector, the same people Obama today wants to tax for being too rich, which while it sounds crazy, if you recall the law stated above, you’ll understand why.
Postwar American capitalism totally debunked all Marxist theory. It proved that everything Marx said he wanted to achieve for the proletariat could instead be achieved without state controls or supervision.
Postwar American small business capitalism proved the modern socialist ideal into exactly as what it always was…one gigantic shell game. After all, 90% of the world’s poor live in poverty today because the states wills them into poverty, while 50% of all world’s wealth is now directed toward the care and feeding of the state class and its clients.
To the state, today, the game is all about power. There is no high moral purpose about “fairness” or “equality” It is only about who will be on top; the government class, the takers, or the workers and entrepreneurs who made it all work, the makers.
The destruction of the American private sector is now a naked power grab, for once done, there will be no one to argue again for a century, at least.
The state’s end game is to destroy, not reorient, not bring down to size, but to destroy the American private sector middle class and reduce it to what it always was elsewhere, a class of fishmongers, street peddlers and itinerant journeymen who will come fix the faucet for people who are in the same dire straights they are, and cannot get a piece of paper from the government that says they can go to the homes of the middle class to do the same work.
Obama believes, if citizens want to get into the real middle class, as he and his wife have advised, drop the Business, Accounting and Engineering degrees and get a degree in urban 
government, then apply for a job down at DMV.
(Coming soon to a DMV near you.)
So you don’t have to be Bill Gates to understand why America is so hated not just by the hardcore Marxists, but also by the hot tub Swedish socialists of Europe.
It isn’t our oil barons, our shipping magnates, our manufacturing tycoons, even our multi-millionaires playing basketball, composers and performers of absolute dreck in literature and music, or mere millionaires servicing our central air and heating.
It’s where they all came from that’s impermissible, from the bottom of the heap, without a hall pass.
And if you think the American government has no experience in managing this, think again. It has become very proficient for over forty years, in locking away 10%-15% of the American population already. The American government has become very good at building clean and safe (at the beginning) holes in the ground, constantly repainting, refurbishing and refitting them, taking out old A/C units, refrigerators and replacing them, then throwing in cell phones, food stamps and lottery tickets…
…but never handing down a ladder or a way out.
They win when they can ensnare another 20% by closing up the small business middle class, for then there is no turning back.
That process began in 2009 and moves apace.
