USA - Poverty is approaching the levels of the 1960s

Fable of American Prosperity

by Mark Malvasi

Following the Second World War, Hayek tried in vain to warn Western capitalists that they had set themselves on the “road to serfdom” at the very moment when the West stood on the threshold of unprecedented economic affluence, which would have been impossible without the intervention of government. At the turn of the twentieth century, the financier J. P. Morgan had quipped that those concerned about the price of a yacht couldn’t afford one. Decades before I went to work in the steel mill during the late 1970s, steelworkers, like truck drivers, plumbers, electricians, and other workingmen, could afford speed boats and fishing vessels, if not yachts, second and even third vehicles, summer homes, and Caribbean vacations for their wives and daughters, during which time many lavished expensive attention on their mistresses, all pleasures reserved for the well-to-do in a bygone era.Karl Marx got it wrong, but so, too, did Friedrich von Hayek. Marx predicted that as capitalism advanced, the number of poor would grow and the number of rich diminish, inflicting ever more cruel torment on the masses. In the twentieth century, even before the Great War, the opposite was happening. Increased wealth, much of which finding its way into the hands of workers, helped to dissolve class barriers and to make possible upward social mobility.

When prosperity returned to the United States during the 1950s, it seemed widespread, enduring, even permanent. It wasn’t. An important point of contention in the presidential campaign was whether Barak Obama or MittRomney had the best plan to revive the economy. The concerns were, and remain, serious and the efforts of both candidates were no doubt sincere, but the debate as it was conducted was irrelevant, for it neglected a more basic condition: the fable of American prosperity.

The most significant development in the lives of many Americans, to say nothing of hundreds of millions around the world, during the second half of the twentieth century was the advent of mass consumption.

...........................

Read more: www.theimaginativeconservative.org