Class Warfare, When Did the War Start?

In recent months, amid threats of tax increases, certain power centers have begun warning of the dangers of “class warfare.” My first reaction to that was annoyance. Where did these “classes” come from? The United States is a class-less society. The answer to that is that this is all about economics. Certainly, we have a middle class, and upper-income and lower-income people. So we do have economic classes, and we certainly don’t them involved in wars. Okay, I’ll accept the argument that we have economic classes and move on. But my first point is to warn everyone to be suspicious when people start talking about “classes” and “class warfare.”

If you look at the economics of the so-called “classes,” you’ll see that the wealthy "classes," whether feudal lords, nineteenth century slave-owners, or wealthy industrialists of the modern era, have always tried to maximize their income. Nothing wrong with that. And one way to maximize your income is to pay your workers as little as possible. I guess that’s all right also, as long as one's religion will allow one to do that. And, it follows, of course, that it’s okay for the workers to unionize to get a bigger share of the pie for themselves. But, is getting a union to bargain for you class warfare? If class warfare really exists, then union battles are certainly a part of it. But the industrialist also tried to get a bigger share of the pie by paying low wages. That’s class warfare also. If the concept of class warfare is valid, then it has always existed and probably always will exist.

Note that when things were going good for big business, no one talked of class warfare. However, when a new administration is elected that might tax the well-to-do at at a higher rate, then suddenly we have class warfare. No, either we’ve always had class warfare or we’ve never had it. I believe the use of the word “warfare” is an intentional attempt to manipulate the public. We should acknowledge that there is, and always will be, a struggle by every individual to get as big a piece of the pie for himself as possible.

But as part of that struggle for economic success, it is the responsibility of society as a whole to decide what is a fair distribution of the wealth and what isn’t. The United States will never be a nation that allows people to literally starve to death. The United States proved in the 1930’s that it is not a nation that allows large segments of the population to have no jobs and live in poverty. The United States of today has to decide what needs to be done to keep our once-huge middle class from slipping away.