Clay Olsen | January 22, 2014
Something that we have heard constantly for many, many years and something that I guarantee we will hear much more of during this year is class warfare rhetoric. Recently, the newly elected New York mayor, Bill de Blasio, made a speech in which he stated, “We are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities… We will ask the very wealthy to pay a little more in taxes so that we can” have X, Y, and Z. He reminds me of the ignorant kid from second grade who ran on free ice cream for his class presidential campaign. It is an old speech that never actually produces results. But let us continue our investigation into this philosophy known as class warfare.
This tactic is not a new one. It has been around for much longer than any of our lifetimes. The scheme was given the spotlight by a man named Karl Marx. Marx believed that the upper class, the bourgeois as he called them, was suppressing the working class, the proletariat. In order for the proletariat to regain ownership of his livelihood, he must join his fellow man and overthrow the evil bourgeois class. Now this is undoubtedly a quick summary of his ideas, but that is the meat of it. I believe that this idea is being rammed through the minds of the American people, and I fear it will hurt our country.
A great example of the implementation of class warfare attacks is the 2012 election. Of course, you can look at any recent presidential election and see similarities, but it is easiest to view the one that is freshest in our minds. Right now, think to yourself and use one word to describe Mitt Romney based on what you heard during the campaign. Well, if you watched any news or heard any speeches you all probably thought of the same word: rich. Yes, Mitt Romney is an extremely wealthy man. And because this is what you thought of when I asked you to describe Romney, the media will give themselves a pat on the back because that was their goal, to paint Mitt Romney as a rich, old, white man. The amount of Romney’s wealth was constantly being pointed out and yet no talk of how he achieved his success.
His previous private sector career was described as a destructive one. Supposedly Romney’s job was to fire a lot of people and steal their money. Isn’t that horrible! In actuality, Romney was part of a company that would get calls for help from struggling businesses. Romney and his team would meet with the executives of the company to learn about the business. They then would advise them about what a smart plan would be to move forward and grow. Sometimes this involved saying, “If you employ all 100 of your employees, you will go bankrupt so for now, you have to let 15 of them go.” Now a fool would look at this and call Mitt the devil for causing the firing of 15 hard working Americans. Yes, some lost their jobs in these processes, but all 100 employees would have lost their jobs had not the company taken their advice. As the company grows, it can hire 20 or 30 or 50 more people. Mitt Romney did not make his money in an unethical fashion. On the contrary, he made his money by doing more for the private sector than we could hope to do. Yet he was demonized for his earnings.
A lot of this class warfare rhetoric sprung from a movement that was started in 2011 called Occupy Wall Street. The premise of the movement was to educate people about the “1 percenters.” They wanted to get people furious at the extremely wealthy people in America. Well this classy movement bled out due to rapes, drug overdoses and murders that occurred within their “camps” and now belongs to the history books. What stuck was this notion that if you are not in the top 1%, you should be angry and demand more to be squeezed from the rich and given to you. A common theme coming from the Obama campaign was that “the rich need to pay their fair share.” It was thought that the rich needed to pay more taxes. Fun fact: the top 10% pays for 70% of the income taxes in this country due to a progressive income tax system.
The liberals’ thirst to take more money is almost comparable to their fierce craving to spend us into oblivion. Democrat campaigns are relying on a certain message: “The rich guy doesn’t deserve his wealth. Vote for me so I can take it away from him and give it to you.” Soon Democratic primaries will amount to the candidates attacking each other by pointing out that one did not spend enough or that one did not tax the rich enough. Sadly, this is what politics has become. We are being taught by politicians to hate our neighbor if he has a bigger house, nicer car, or better job than us. We are being taught that that neighbor deserves to have more taken away from him. We cheer at the thought of higher taxes being implemented on those that are a step above us. Well I have a message for our politicians: we the people are not split into bourgeois and proletariat classes. We the people are a united country that doesn’t need a handful of corrupt men telling us who deserves what. There was a time in America when men aspired to be greater. And this aspiration was accompanied by hard work, not hatred.
The Dissent 