Written by  Classical Liberal 

 

 

A post-election poll by YouGov found that in the 2019 UK General Election, the age over which a plurality of voters voted Conservative was 39 years old.

Delving into the detail, we find that 19% of 18-24-year-olds voted Conservative, 62% Labour, and 19% voted for the Liberals and other insignificant parties. Among 25-34-year-olds, 27% voted Conservative, 51% Labour, and 22% others. In the 35-44 age group, 36% voted Conservative, 39% Labour, and 25% others. For 45-54-year-olds, 46% voted Conservative, 28 Labour, and 26% others. 49% of 55-64-year-olds voted Conservative, 27% Labour, and 24% others. In the 65 plus age group, 64% voted Conservative, 17% Labour, and 19% others.

These statistics demonstrate two key points. Firstly, political wisdom comes with age. Secondly, if the election had been up to those in their 20’s and 30’s, we’d now be living under the dictatorship of Comrade Corbyn. This begs a vital question. As voters in their 20’s and 30’s age, will they continue to support cultural Marxism, or will they see sense and vote Tory? I think that a lot of this will hinge on the economy. Most of us had radical phases in our student days but grew out of it as we became more affluent and took on more responsibilities. We acquired a stake in the system, which gave us a desire to protect it – and ourselves – rather than to squeeze the pips ‘till they squeak and destroy it. If the economy works and most of these young radicals become middle-class, they will support the system as it benefits them.

But, if the economy doesn’t work and most of these useful idiots continue to be generation rent and embittered with a capitalist system that sees them struggling at the bottom of the pile, they will vote for those who would dismantle capitalism as much as they can. Unfortunately for us, the capitalist system no longer seems to work as well as it once did, in the sense of sharing its benefits as widely as possible, when it made more people more affluent than any other economic system in history. Robert Reich, an American professor of economics who served as Secretary of Labor for Bill Clinton, suggests that severe income inequality is the leading factor eroding American democracy. It is often said that when America sneezes, the rest of the Western world catches a cold. And what Reich says about the USA does seem to hold equally true for the UK.

In his 2015 book “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few”, Reich asks, ‘Do you recall a time when the income of a single schoolteacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family?’ He does.

In the 1950s, his father sold clothes to the wives of factory workers, and the family earned enough to live comfortably. Today, this middle class is rapidly shrinking: American income inequality and wealth disparity is the greatest it’s been in eighty years. As Reich shows, the threat to capitalism is no longer communism or fascism. Rather, a steady undermining of the trust modern societies need for growth and stability.

Reich’s treatise on inequality in America begins with a central premise: The free market is fundamentally a human construct. Thus, to debate the appropriateness of government in shaping it is beside the point. Someone is always writing the rules of the market. Reich’s concern is that the lead authors have been Wall Street, big corporations, and the wealthy elite over the last three decades. He fears that ‘we are lurching toward a capitalism so top-heavy it cannot be sustained’.

Reich criticises the Citizens United decision, corporate lobbying, tax rates on capital gains, and ‘dynastic wealth’ accrual. But he also hints at another culprit for modern political and economic distortions, less obvious than the superrich and thereby all the more insidious: a naïve faith in the American dream. Myths and legends, as Hunter S. Thompson observed, die hard in America, but perhaps none so hard as this one. Reich, raised in South Salem, New York, remembers when ‘work hard, get ahead’ was still very achievable. His father’s first shop eventually yielded a second shop. ‘We weren’t rich’, Reich writes, ‘but never felt poor’. For 30 years after World War II, the family’s income and purchasing power grew in lockstep with the American economy, as did that of the broader middle-class.

In the decades since, however, upward mobility has largely vanished. Sometime in the 1970s, wages began to stagnate, though productivity gains and economic growth continued. By 2013, after adjusting for inflation, the median American household was earning less than it did in 1989. More than two-thirds of Americans were living from paycheck to paycheck. The winnings at the top, meanwhile, have piled up. In 1978, the chief executives of America’s big companies took home 30 times the pay of their average workers; in 2013, that multiplier was 296. Most people don’t have a shot at even getting close to such wealth. Middle-income children are half as likely to climb to the top quintile as those born there are to stay; the odds of reaching the financial top are just 6 per cent for children of the most impoverished families.

Despite this, Horatio Alger’s creed remains strong. As of early 2014, two-thirds of Americans agreed that hard work would get most people ahead, and a full 80 per cent felt that ‘everyone has it in their power to succeed’, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center. Yet, those adages have become perverse in today’s economy, more inclined to depress than to inspire. ‘The notion that you’re paid what you’re “worth”,’ Reich writes, ‘is by now so deeply ingrained in the public consciousness that many who earn very little assume it’s their own fault’.

In his 2020 book “The System: Who Rigged it, How We Fix it”  Reich describes how millions of Americans have lost confidence in their political and economic system. After years of stagnant wages, volatile job markets, and an unwillingness by those in power to deal with profound threats such as climate change, there is a mounting sense that the system is fixed, serving only those select few with enough money to secure a controlling stake.

In “The System”, Reich shows how wealth and power have interacted to install an elite oligarchy, eviscerate the middle class, and undermine democracy. Reich exposes how those at the top, be they Democrats or Republicans, propagate myths about meritocracy, national competitiveness, corporate social responsibility, and the ‘free market’ to distract most Americans from their own accumulation of extraordinary wealth and their power over the system. Instead of answering the call to civic duty, they have chosen to uphold self-serving policies that line their own pockets and benefit their bottom line.

Reich urges all Americans outside the wealthiest 1% to stop thinking about left vs. right or Democrat vs. Republican. Instead, the crucial battle is Oligarchy vs. Democracy. No matter what they say publicly about promoting democracy within a vigorous capitalistic economy, the oligarchs care almost exclusively about expanding their wealth. The accumulation of such wealth, writes Reich, has destroyed the middle class and offers nothing but misery to minimum wage workers.

Classical liberals, like the fabled Adam Smith, believed that people are motivated by self-interest and that society is held together by mutual self-interest. In short, if we want the young to embrace our values, not those of Comrade Corbyn, we need to do whatever we can to share the benefits of liberal capitalism as widely as possible. It is in our self-interest – self-preservation – to do so. If we give the young a few crumbs from our table, most of them will support us. If we fail to provide them with enough to buy their acquiescence, they will elect a government that can cause us much more hardship than the cost of giving them a few crumbs—for example, a higher inheritance tax on what we pass on to our children and grand-children, a higher tax on pensions, etc.

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