Oh, Social Justice! Cry me a river you might say and that's just what our leftist friends have done. It's nearly as funny to watch them chain themselves up to campfires and oppressed rabbit cages as it is frustrating to behold their expose websites packed with a mixed bag of clever pictures and sensationalist writing. But yawn, liberals have one volume as of late, always screaming "Class warfare!", "Sexism!", "Racism!", "Bigotry!", "Injustice!", "Revolution!". Salvation would come, if we just followed the slogans, chipped in and gave them liberals all of our money and most of our freedom. They promise to give it back to us, if we deserve it. Of course, if we disagree that plan, we would be hateful rich nazi racists that like to beat on some bitches - not that there's anything wrong with that.
So social justice, really, is power seeking propaganda based on dividing people into oppressors and their victims. Rich vs poor, black vs white, christian vs jew or muslim, gay vs straight -for every niche there's a "class warfare!", "racism!", or some other slogan. Parishoners of social justice rise up for one group, and smite the other that is said to molest the innocent. Progressive taxation, estate taxes, unionization, boycotts, violent protests, marches and the occasional assassination, bombing and revolution, remain the tools which progressives use to advance their agenda.
No doubt the Democratic Party largely accepts this basic world view. America's present economic problems would be entirely solved, the President's supporters argue, if we but punished these evil groups, and took from them, to give to some other group. President Obama, they argue, has not gone far enough, because he offers a compromise with the evil groups. His leadership is not policy making to his supporters, its clemency.
Once upon a time, back in the days of Reader's Digest, when Republican meant Blue on election night, conservatives would try to argue with the left in reasonable terms, of tried and true cultural traditions, of economic efficiency, and with the nuanced argument that equality is about opportunity, not a mandated levelling in life. They did their best to at least sound reasonable, almost sedate, unexciting, and boring, and above tried to project sexless paternity, as if they were fathers reaching for the whiskey and a smoke and sighing over a piece of some shocking thing the left had done. And, they'd check the stock market to see if maybe that's how their babies were made.
Reason, above all else, was their way, at least on paper. It turned out that behind the scenes, they actually had the best parties. They'd have a few drinks of the best whiskey, carve up the world with their plutocratic allies, arrange a few assasinations of a few communists around the city and the globe, smash up a union or two, show off the newest gun, and then, relax over a tremendous dinner in a smashing suit with the best kind of women - the easy but faithful kind.
Protests and marches and demonstrations, those were things the others did, the communists did.
There's no need for revolutions when you rule.
But some among them panic'd against the liberal cries and laws, and they threw away their whiskey and stock quotes and easy but faithful women and became revolutionaries themselves, because they just had to fight back. The previous reasonable Republican was ushered out the door as a RINO, a Republican In Name Only, and he was replaced by a newer and more revolutionary firebrand type.
That new type was not afraid to adopt the social justice line of thinking of the left, and wound up making the same mistakes that the leftists make.
So, today's political discourse in America is about social justice, and its become as profitable as it is endemic.
Ask the leftist to just ration entitlements to the neediest, and she will crow on in books and songs and movies about the slippery slope where the rich will drive oil dumping monster trucks over the broken innocent backs of the poor, warning that we'll all be tossed into coal mines and be forced to work the mills with our children for 2 cents a day if the right has its way. Its damn good money. Democrats will, by themselves, raise a billion dollars in election funds this year, and that doesn't count the vast book, music and media empire that drives information through the left that is worth billions.
Ask a righty to consider even a 2% tax increase, and he will bleat on talk radio and web sites that its a socialist precursor to a Khmer Rouge style take over where every right winger's head will be placed in a massive pile of skulls on Wall Street by a Hillary Clinton turned Pol Pot. Talk show hosts, radio announcers, and newspapers, all will cash in, and of course, the RNC will raise a billion dollars during the course of the election.
Social justice? It gets a lot of people elected and even more people rich, and that's good for entertainment, but its utterly useless for the problems that we have at hand in America.
Historically, the USA has been able to have relatively high wages because abundant natural resources, particularly in energy, made the United States not only generally self sufficient but also extremely competitive on global markets. Iron and oil and coal and natural gas and copper are out there, but they are getting ever more expensive to get, and require more capital and that means less competition. Advances in medicine had made it possible to treat a lot of illnesses that were untreatable, but those fancy drugs and machines all cost money.
America's costs of doing business are going up, the cost of living is going up, and wages are staying flat in a vain effort to compensate for both.
We are, at best, standing still in world markets, but, by any sane measure, particularly, the trade deficit, we are getting killed.
Attempts to balance trade by lowering the value of the dollar relative to the rest of the world have had two undesirable effects. First, would be trading partners buy more dollars to keep the dollar high, anyway, and, any decline in dollars undermines the value of any overseas investment in America.
Armed with all of that, we have hopeless rhetoric and plans coming from both political camps. Ironically, for all the fury of their debate, the country is largely going to wind up in the same place, left to either political faction.
The left argues that we should redistribute what wealth we have evenly to combat rising poverty, while at the same argues that we should in fact curtail our resource usage even further. Thus, the left, in the name of social justice, wants to shrink the economy even further, and cause even more poverty, with a bit of tax and spend to make people feel better about being poor. Constrained by shrinking budgets, the left actually chops spending for any sort of a project that might break the cycle of decline, and in fact, they make it worse.
The right, on the other hand, argues that the country should simply accept that it is going to be poorer as a consequence of the natural order of things. A shrinking economy, they argue, is only proof that the government does not know what it is doing, and condemn the government by essentially blocking every federal idea that might work, in the name of those ideas that have failed. Except that, they argue for more government laws to support the private sector, such as, lengthening copyrights, changing patents, immunization against lawsuits, and so on. To make matters worse, the right has utterly abandoned its traditional emphasis on science and reason and advocates subsidies for drilling and mining for oil and resources that science has established will not be sufficient, and at enormous environmental cost.
Neither of these plans will make resources less expensive, and so will do nothing to address American competitiveness.
Neither party has been able to produce a lasting and real balanced budget since the late 1960s.
Any serious restructuring of the American economy has to place a heavy emphasis on an expertise in low cost energy production by any way possible. Politically, any real commitment to develop a national skill and interest in everything from solar to nuclear fusion and nuclear fission research is blocked by a variety of groups left and right and until those blocks are lifted, the United States will increasingly lag behind countries that do make that commitment.
Cheap energy is more important than lower taxes and is more useful as infrastructure than even highways and the government has a right to be involved in it. What's needed is a wholesale replacement of aging fossil infrastructure with newer systems, and in such a way as to lower energy bills. That will produce significant economic growth, and done correctly, the USA could even become a net exporter of energy - particularly to Latin America and particularly if we have an enormous buildout in electrical transmission and generation infrastructure.
New kinds of fission reactor designs, and fusion experiments, are available, waiting to be tried, and should be funded, even if this means a modest reduction in our defense budget, and the occasional federal investment turning sour.
Lowering the deficit, overall, means capping entitlements and raising taxes. By capping entitlements, we probably need to have rationing of sorts in health care, and cost sharing. And, taxes probably need to come up to pay for the fact that the country has aged and simply needs more health care. Either that, or the defense budget will have to be draconianly cut, and honestly, probably all of the above is what's needed.
Cities and people that are poor can be best lifted up not by raising taxes on the rich, although that can help to pay for the military the rich benefits the most from, but, by lowering hidden taxes, fees, and regulations on the average citizen. Eliminating cigarette taxes alone by $2 a pack puts $1000 a year into the pockets of the working poor, and that would be an enormous boost to consumer demand. Some modest deregulation to allow staple products such as cars and appliances to be less expensive similarly would increase demand.