Two bigfoot journos have concluded that the 2024 presidential election is not really a fight between left and right. It’s between the insiders who have grown rich off the system and we financially struggling outsiders.
Staunch anti-Trumper David Brooks, at The New York Times, writes:
"We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement.
"Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation."
Trump sympathizer Matt Taibbi, at Racket News, writes:
"Voters are abandoning traditional blue-red political identities and realigning according to more explosive divisions based on education and income.
"As the middle class vanishes the replacement endgame emerges.
"A small pocket of very wealthy and very educated, for whom elections have until now mostly been ceremonial and to whom more fraught realities of the current situation are an annoyance, will move to one side."
I’m not prescribing class warfare, that old Marxist warhorse.
I am here to advocate for capitalist universal opulence.
Which, indeed, has vanished.
Where did it go?
How do we get it back?
Labor leader Stan Sorscher wrote in the Huffington Post, Inequality — "X" Marks the Spot — Dig Here, that "Something happened in the mid-70s that caused wages of goods-producing workers to flatline even while major sector productivity skyrocketed."
And . . . "If wages had followed the post-war trend, households would have a trillion dollars more to spend on health care and education."
In my response published in the National Pulse I wrote, "As it happens, 'X' correlates with Nixon shutting down the Bretton Woods gold standard in 1971 and the epic failure to get it fixed and restored in 1973.
"The drag, after a modest lag, filtered into the working economy. The rest is persistent stagnation for median families.
"It was the destruction of the (dilute) gold standard which precipitated the death, or at least long coma, of the American Dream."
The right ignores this problem. That’s a morally and politically indefensible stance.
The left prefers to treat the symptom with "Hopium" . . . which never works.
And here we are.
On Aug. 15, 2023 we observe the anniversary of the policy catastrophe that in due course lit the burning dumpster that is modern American politics.
President Nixon then "temporarily" closed the gold window.
52 years later? Still closed.
Could that closed window really be the origin of our dumpster fire? You bet.
Keynes observed in "The Economic Consequences of the Peace":
"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
"The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
That polymath, 500 years ago, Copernicus, in his "Essay on the Minting of Money," wrote:
"Although there are countless maladies that are forever causing the decline of kingdoms, princedoms, and republics, the following four (in my judgment) are the most serious: civil discord, a high death rate, sterility of the soil, and the debasement of coinage.
"The first three are so obvious that everyone recognizes the damage they cause; but the fourth one, which has to do with money, is noticed by only a few very thoughtful people, since it does not operate all at once and at a single blow, but gradually overthrows governments, and in a hidden, insidious way."
The Bank of England noted in a 2011 comprehensive study that the gold standard well surpassed the Federal Reserve Note standard for economic growth and equitable prosperity.
Supply-side icon Bob Mundell made a comparable point in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "A Reconsideration of the Twentieth Century."
Politics has become a struggle between the "haves" and the "have nots."
Not between the right and the left.
David Brooks and Matt Taibbi offer no solution.
Brooks: " . . . the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, 'History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.' That is the destiny our class is now flirting with."
Taibbi: "the subtext of Campaign 2024 is already the obvious drift of rich and poor voters in opposite directions, which can’t end well."
As hope is not a strategy, neither is despair.
The degradation of the dollar is the root cause of the polarization of America into the haves and the have nots.
Making the dollar, in the words of my old political hero Jack Kemp, "as good as gold" is the practical way to extinguish the dumpster fire that is consuming politics.
Presidential aspirants? Promise, if elected, to reopen the gold window!
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $94T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.
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