Justice Louis Brandeis, 80 years ago, said, ” We must make our choice. We can have democracy or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.” Brandeis probably couldn’t have imagined that the disparity in wealth could ever grow to what it is today in the US.
The Trump administration has conveyed their belief that the way to stop crime in our cities is to send in the military. Before he was assassinated, Charlie Kirk supported the idea, saying that we couldn’t afford to have such crime in our great cities, so “send in the tanks,” he said. I have heard many opposing sending the military to fight crime on the basis that the crime rates in the cities are going down. I have heard few say that, whatever the crime rates, this isn’t the way to fight it.
The crime in our cities is not a problem of a lack of interdiction. It is a structural problem. People commit crimes because of poverty, drug addiction and the accessibility of guns. Virtually all street criminals would rather have a comfortable monthly income than to have to break the law. I moved to Poland from the US more than 20 years ago ( I remain an American citizen) and the added perspective I gained is instructive in many ways. There is virtually no crime problem in Polish and other EU cities. I may not be able to speak for every city in Europe but one experience was edifying. A few years ago I found myself in Paris waiting in a subway station alone after midnight. I heard footsteps coming down the stairs and found it to be a woman, also alone, and nicely dressed. I asked her about how safe she felt and she said, yes, she felt perfectly safe.
During the current government shutdown there was much reporting on the privations of those with federal government jobs and those recieving SNAP benefits. Many people have little more than enough money to pay their immediate living expenses. You often hear that the US is the richest country in the world. This must be qualified: the top half of the US is the richest country in the world. The bottom half not at all.
In the US, the top 1% hold 30 – 32% of the wealth, (about $51 trillion) a number that has constantly grown for decades. The bottom 50% holds 2.5 %!!! This disparity is unheard of in most other countries. Here is a quick comparison of other countries where data is available.
………………………….top 1% bottom 50%
US 30-32% 2-3% Britain 10 9
France 20-26 4-6
Italy 20-30 6-10
Japan 12-18 8-12
The crime in cities caused by the impoverishment of the bottom half of society cannot be overcome by National Guards, federal troops, more police or more arrests. The most obvious path is to reverse the redistribution of wealth from the lower classes to the richest classes that has been going on for decades. How to do this of course is the problem. It will entail many steps and hard working public servants who want to curtail our system of legalized bribes to congressmen, changing the tax schedule so it looks more like it did under Eisenhower and earlier administrations, stopping off-shore tax havens and all the rest of the ways the rich are permitted to rip us off legally. And also will entail changing climate of public opinion to embrace the belief that maintaining a billionaire class is antithetical to freedom and democracy. And fighting the Fox News mentality which is constantly demonizing the welfare state and the slackers and cheaters who get “handouts” from the state. The Trump administration recently announced that there would be work requirements to get SNAP benefits. I can imagine the cheering from the MAGA crowd how this would spite the freeloaders. Turns out the vast majority of recipients who are not children nor handicapped already work – the working poor.
And there are other ways in which the bottom 50% in other countries are better off than in the US. The minimum wage is a living wage and the working classes make much closer to the professionsl classes. Also the universal health care systems are far superior in serving the bottom half than in the US. Universal health care is not free health care. It means that the costs are shared more equally iu the society. It also means that the costs are less because they are not paying middle men – the health insurance robber barons. Of the billions of dollars we pay health insurance companies in the US, much of it goes to pay CEO’s, board members, staff and stock holder’s dividends. This is money that goes to medical services in the EU.
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.”
The “we” in Justice Brandeis’s quote is an abstract construct. But the “we” that are choosing wealth in the hands of a few are also choosing power in the hands of a few. And power in the hands of a few and not the American people is a good working definition of the absence of democracy. Ray Tut <mintchippolitics.com>
