Chuck,
You are not only incorrect, but your premise flies in the face of common
sense. It is in the interest of the privileged class to not only maintain
the middle class but to increase the middle class. Who is going to buy the
products and services offered by the privileged, if the middle class is not
strong and growing.

I think you might actually believe what you say, but there is no basis in
logic or fact for your theories.


wrote in message
ps.com...
Sounds very noble, but that flies in the face of a long-proven reality.
The privileged class has a specific interest in maintaining or even
increasing the number of poor and desperate people in this country
while at the same time decreasing any public infrastructure or funding
to relieve some of the hardships suffered by the poor. It's called
labor force. We want lotsof people who will work as cheaply as
possible. In fact, when our own poor people ask for a minimum wage job
the privileged class declares minimum wage "too much" to pay and seeks
out a foreign labor force even more poor, more desperate, and more
willing to work for a handful of rice a day.

It went on in the last great flood down south in the 20's, and it's
still going on today. During the flood where VP Hoover served as the
government emergency coordinator, there were several thousand people
stranded on a levee. Times being as they were in the 20's, the
government naturally evacuated all the white people first. When the
government began evacuating the poor black folks on the levee, local
business leaders pressured the administration to stop. They said that
if the black people were even temporarily relocated, they would have a
hard time rebuilding their agricultural labor force. In the end, an
encampment of poor folks rose on that levee that was something like a
mile and a half from end to end. The government hauled food out to
them, but refused to take any of them off the levee. IIRC, it took a
couple of weeks for the water to recede to where the poor people could
get off on their own.

Under your proposed social solution, perhpas we should have simply
dropped a handful of lumber and a drawing of a raft onto the
levee/island? The industrious
folks could have built a raft and escaped- oh, but wait, no lumber and
no drawing of a raft for these folks- it would have worked against the
interests of
the privileged class for any of these people to relocate out of the
area. The economic value of somebody willing to or forced to work for
only the tiniest fraction of the value produced in a work day is very
high, and such an "asset" shouldn't be squandered.

Times have changed, but human nature hasn't.

It's tough to demand that somebody pull themselves up by the bootstraps
when they don't even have any boots, let alone a pair with straps.