Back in the 50s I think it was Martin Luther King who said that the United States is socialism for the rich and hardscrabble capitalism for the poor. And he started the Poor People’s Campaign, where every federal budget cycle they will produce their Poor People’s budget. And it’s still going on.
It does not get as depressed as it probably should, but it says, “If we were going to take care of the poor people, this is how the budget would be. We take this much out of the military and we’d move it over here to social services, transportation, or whatever.”
And so yeah, this country is a really interesting experiment in inequity.
And it’s not really what the Founding Fathers had in mind. It’s not what Jefferson had in mind where you would have farmers who were educating themselves and thinking for themselves and earning a good living.
We’re far from some of those founding principles and I think the hope for the future is that we return to some of those core principles of self-responsibility and taking care of each other.
