Skip to main content

Wealth and Democracy

By

Seeing the anniversary of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations brought to mind Kevin Phillips' Wealth and Democracy, in which he demonstrates that the rise of wealth has led to a corresponding decline in democracy,

In the Phillips theory, economic and political forces in the U.S. and other countries have repeatedly generated periods featuring speculative bubbles, political scandals, bursts of inflation and deflation, and voter revolts. The excesses of America's free market and moneybags democracy in particular make the pattern re-occur in intense series of booms and busts. Phillips identifies three distinct U.S. historical cycles--we are at the end of the third--in which the egalitarian policies of moderate GOP Presidents Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, and Richard M. Nixon get replaced "conclusively by the language of Wall Street, Darwinism, and tax-cut worship." The result each time has been a greater concentration of wealth and power at the top.

Comments

  1. James FergusonMarch 9, 2010 at 1:39 PM

    I don't know how much an "egalitarian" Nixon, or for that matter McKinley, was. I think their administrations both suffered under recessions, otherwise they would have been as speculative as any other Republican administration.

    ReplyDelete
  2. avrdsMarch 9, 2010 at 5:52 PM

    This might make for a very good discussion given recent events.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more