Demise of the Middle Class

I was chatting with an old friend yesterday, a retired internal medicine physician, who brought up the subject of the extremely large and ever-growing gulf between rich and poor, how it’s ruining American society.

As we see at left, this is not a new concept in human civilization. Moreover, there doesn’t appear to be a remedy, insofar as the rich own the policy-making processes, and guess what, they seem to want to hold on to their wealth and power and have little interest in having it redistributed.

I responded that I had seen this coming when I was in high school.  I told my friends that we seem to be living in the end days of free-market capitalism.

The struggle was a mighty one, with organized labor fighting hard for a long while between the end of the Enlightenment and the last few decades, but that battle appears to be over, and corporate greed has become insatiable.  The winners have won and the losers have lost.

Maybe I’m wrong.  It has happened before.