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Class Warfare, Take 2
Oct. 7th, 2011 10:04 amSo, the "Occupy Wall Street" (OWS) movement is getting some mainstream media attention. I'm not sure I agree with the protesters (they look to me like they took logical thinking classes from the Tea Party) but with unemployment at 9.1%, protests are certainly understandable. At any rate, the OWS movement has drawn fire from people like Eric Cantor to Herman Cain who call it "class warfare." Well, as David Brin points out, class warfare has been going on since at least the invention of agriculture.
Personally, I don't get upset about a little class warfare. I've used the predator and prey analogy before, and I think it fits in this case. The prey not only has no obligation to go down quietly, it's better for everybody, including the predator, if they fight as hard as possible. The goal of democracy is not to prevent strife, but to prevent violent strife.
At any rate, Brin, in his somewhat rambling post, notes that the American Founding Fathers decided that part of the democratic solution was to ban primogeniture. Primogeniture is the practice of automatically and by default giving all property and wealth to the eldest son, and folks like Thomas Jefferson were dead-set against it. What they sought to avoid was the concentration of wealth and power that resulted from primogeniture - a concentration that led to the French Revolution, among other evils.
In short, the Founding Fathers engaged in pre-emptive class warfare. This warfare was continued by other means, from the estate tax to various workers rights and industrial safety laws. The bottom line is that we've always had class warfare in America and always will.
Personally, I don't get upset about a little class warfare. I've used the predator and prey analogy before, and I think it fits in this case. The prey not only has no obligation to go down quietly, it's better for everybody, including the predator, if they fight as hard as possible. The goal of democracy is not to prevent strife, but to prevent violent strife.
At any rate, Brin, in his somewhat rambling post, notes that the American Founding Fathers decided that part of the democratic solution was to ban primogeniture. Primogeniture is the practice of automatically and by default giving all property and wealth to the eldest son, and folks like Thomas Jefferson were dead-set against it. What they sought to avoid was the concentration of wealth and power that resulted from primogeniture - a concentration that led to the French Revolution, among other evils.
In short, the Founding Fathers engaged in pre-emptive class warfare. This warfare was continued by other means, from the estate tax to various workers rights and industrial safety laws. The bottom line is that we've always had class warfare in America and always will.
