Can Republicans Save the Middle Class?A certain kind of rich man’s policies and hobbies are a bulldozer rolling over the poor.
By Anthony Esolen
June 14, 2022
Right now, Americans are experiencing the dire effects of the most regressive and unjust tax of all: government-engineered and government-fueled inflation. Let us consider the matter. What is an extra $50 at the gas tank to the rich man? He can absorb the loss. What if a box of cookies at Walmart costs $5 instead of $2? He doesn’t go there anyway. Why, he can offset the extra expense of the high price of oil, which becomes the extra expense of everything else either made of oil or delivered by oil or gasoline, by eating at home a little more often than at his favorite restaurant.
I am exaggerating a little, I know, but you get the point. People need food, shelter, clothing, and the means to get around to do their work, and they need the work, too, work that will permit a man to support his wife and children, so that home and not the workplace, the street and the neighborhood and not the highway and the strip mall, will be the center of human activity. Everything that makes it more expensive for ordinary people to obtain those ordinary goods is, if government policy is behind it, a tax on the working class and the middle class, and it hurts the most vulnerable among us the worst.
The principle is easy to grasp. The rich man eats no more than the poor man. The rich man’s body needs to be kept no warmer in the winter than the poor man’s body. The rich man is probably less likely than the poor man to have to drive a few hundred miles a week.
The Democrats, when my father was young, used to be, as he told me, “for the little guy,” but that has not been reliably true since they gave the black ball to the littlest guy of all, our brother in the womb, and it has not been true at all since the party has cast its lot with the social and ideological hobbies of certain of the rich.
The old jest, that an environmentalist is someone who already has his summer home in the mountains of Colorado, is revealing in its unwittingly Marxist way. For Karl Marx, that great stopped clock in the history of ideas, did understand that, in general, rich people will pursue policies that keep them rich and eliminate the threat of being overtaken from below. The environmentalism that drives up the price of oil is a rich man’s hobby, as the feminism that has helped to drive the skilled trades from our schools (because boys mostly profit by them) is a rich woman’s hobby. The WNBA, indeed, is a rich man’s hobby for sort-of-rich women, as it is financed mainly by the NBA. I can think of plenty of uses for that money that would be far more profitable for basketball-playing boys in our dysfunctional cities.
Far be it from me to tell rich people to give up their hobbies. If the NBA wants to finance the WNBA, it’s scarcely any business of mine. But when hobbies become cultural imperatives, or legal directives, then they are everyone’s business. Then we must ask what the imperatives and directives do for the common good, or, often, whether they tend to harm or ruin the common good.
A party that genuinely cares for the poor will keep its eye on the ordinary goods of human life, and it will attempt to foster conditions that enable the poor to secure those goods at the least cost, by their own initiative, with as little interference from third parties as possible. That does not mean low-cost daycare and food stamps. It means, with few exceptions, no need for daycare and no need for food stamps.
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If the Republicans could hold a thought in their heads for more than a few seconds, they might see an opening, a political shift that would flip the parties for many decades to come. They might, for example, steal a page from the playbook of the much-loathed Franklin Roosevelt. When you drive down the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut, you will see one handsome bridge after another, no two the same, built by men hired by the Works Progress Administration, men who had the skills to do that work but who had no one to hire them, or, and this is really my point here, boys who did not yet have the skills but came to learn them in the doing. The latter made up the main force of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The idea was to get young men out of the vice-ridden slums and put them to work outdoors, hardening their muscles and freshening their hearts, and teaching them how to use tools they had never used before, perhaps had never held or seen before. The idea was, of course, that a young man could go from the CCC into gainful employment elsewhere—why, almost anywhere.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/14/can-republicans-save-the-middle-class/
