During the recent presidential debate, Kamala Harris mentioned an “opportunity economy”, which relates to the concept of social mobility. Social mobility is all about how easy it is to move up or down in social classes. For example, can a working-class person become middle-class through work and effort, or are there nigh-insurmountable barriers in their way? And can a middle-class person become upper class, or is something in their way? For that matter, can the underclass escape from the underclass?
Social mobility is something the super rich seek to limit. They wouldn’t be so special if anyone could get where they are. And of course, if they enabled upward mobility, they would be equally enabling downward mobility, which they will simply never allow. It benefits them to actively work against social mobility, to keep their class locked down. But it mustn’t be so closed off that people have no hope – otherwise, they might start to realize what’s really going on and who’s rigging the game. Instead, they keep the odds non-zero, but astronomically low. Every so often, someone does break through and become super rich, but these cases are rare, and it’s usually someone who’s had some help.
There are people who actually believe that, thanks to the market, anyone can make a fortune and become rich. Well, there’s a difference between “anyone” and “everyone”, isn’t there?
Social mobility is an incredibly important concept in the world. It tells us what opportunities ordinary people have and whether they are equal. In a world with low social mobility, opportunity is extremely unequal. Those who already have vast opportunities (the privileged) will continue to have them, and those who don’t have many will not gain many over their lifetime. This is a blatantly unfair system. Why should the descendants of rich people get the same opportunities as their parents while people in the lower classes don’t have any opportunities?
When you have to do everything for yourself, you develop strength. You have to face challenges and overcome them. If you have had every disadvantage, you’ve had to work very hard to overcome them. If you are born super-rich, meanwhile, you have every door opened for you, every job secured for you. You never have to work hard, and that makes you complacent and weak. You will always expect the world to pander to you – but what would happen if it stopped? What then? The privileged have no value in any healthy, fair, merit-based society because they never have to develop their minds or their skills. They are perpetual infants imagining themselves superior to the rest of us.
Everyone should have to work for what they have. It’s unacceptable to allow inheritance to doom most people and raise up others. Inheritance is the blight that makes lasting inequality possible.
Remove inheritance. Raise social mobility to the maximum possible value. Only then will we have a fair world.
Of course, these concepts are beyond the Trumpians and the Kamalites alike.
When Kamala Harris talks about an “opportunity economy”, she is promising high social mobility, but she will not remove inheritance. That’s what no politician will touch. Even if, by some miracle, she drastically increases social mobility to a level never before seen in America, she will not come out and say that what’s holding humanity back is inheritance (the truth). All politicians are professional liars, and Harris is no different. She’s in the game of public image as much as any other politician. If anyone actually believes her promise of an opportunity economy, they need their sanity checked.
Harris will not deliver what America has long been yearning for. She can’t. She’s just another one – another politician promising to revolutionize the country (whoa, we’ve never seen one of those before!).
We’ve had enough of politician messiahs. It’s time we demanded what we truly deserve from them. No politician ever dares to stand up to the super rich and tell them they have too much money. But it’s time someone did.
In many ways, working-class right-wing capitalists are the most deluded people of all since they have absolutely no reason to defend a system that benefits the super rich and is yet to benefit the working class in any way. They’re always the downtrodden ones, yet they will stand up for free-market capitalism’s “right” to exist; they’ll say how good it is while it continues to ruin and disregard the lives of everyone who isn’t rich.
The market is never free. The question is: who do you want to have control over it? – the super rich scumbags, or the State? Because, make no mistake, the super rich control the market. They don’t want a free market – they want a market that works for them. It’s simply that a “free market” is one that they can best take control of because it is regulated as little as possible. In this sense, “free” doesn’t mean free; it means free from governmental control, free from regulation, free from anyone ensuring that it works for the common good.
Far from being the giver of opportunity, the market controlled by the super rich is the reinforcement of what’s already established. The rich stay rich; the poor stay poor. The market (and the economy) will not be free until the super rich are deposed.
Reject the super rich!
Reject the puppet politicians!
Reject inequality of opportunity!
Inequality of opportunity = tyranny!
