Class Warfare or a Real Problem?

Much as I hate to say it, it is beginning to look as though what conservative pundits are calling President Obama's class warfare campaign is working - at least among his liberal base.  I live in California and many of my friends and neighbors are very liberal.  Last night, my wife and I went out to dinner to celebrate a personal milestone.  One of the waitstaff volunteered that he was going to vote for Mr. Obama.  I indicated that I was going to vote Republican this time around.  He then told me that he would not vote for Newt Gingrich "if you held a gun to my head."  I asked why, and he explained that Newt had worked for Fannie and Freddie and had been paid $1.6 million.  He voiced no substantive complaint regarding Gingrich's conservative positions on issues.  It was enough for him to know that the former speaker had received a massive amount of money.  I am fairly certain that the gentleman that I was talking with favors the liberal values inherent in Fannie and Freddie and I am also certain that he does not know what advice Gingrich gave those two institutions.  It appears that it was enough that Gingrich made a very large amount of money to disqualify him for the position of president.  The idea that Gingrich might have been trying to work with Fannie and Freddie to help develop a sound housing policy was absent from consideration.

As a conservative, it is easy to complain about Obama's class warfare campaign, but I strongly doubt that his various comments about spreading the wealth around is what gave birth to the various Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.  I think that the genesis of the occupy protest is more fundamental than that, but I do fault the president for playing to the divisions within our society rather than trying to find ways to heal those divisions.  It is clear that he sees this as a useful campaign tactic to move the current political conversation away from his failed policies into an area where there is some degree of discontent with what many within this country perceive to be an imbalance of wealth.  When the conversation turns to this subject, most conservatives bristle and fight back with slogans as limited in persuasive value as those that are shouted back at us.  Work hard and enjoy the fruits of your labor.  Etc.  I agree with those sentiments, but it is pretty clear to me that there is a rather large group of folks in this country that do not.  I part company with Republican political operators who say that the most important thing is to ensure that all conservative voters go to the polls.  "There are more of us than there are of them."  I would argue that while it is important to win elections it is even more important to achieve some degree of consensus about what our national goals are to be going forward.  If all conservatives do is win the election we ensure that we will lose it next time around.

Although I am not angered by it, I do find the huge amounts of money that are being paid to a relatively few flesh and blood people to be fascinating.  When I seek a craftsman to perform one or another home maintenance chore, I carefully consider the hourly cost and judge him or her by the quality of their work and the speed by which they perform it.  A local plumber might receive $50 to $100 per hour.  A carpenter the same.  Yard work goes for $20 to $25 per hour these days (if you do not hire an illegal immigrant).  Then, I read about someone who has made several hundred thousand dollars by sitting in an office somewhere and I ask myself what he or she did that was worth that amount of money.  When I learn that person was given multiple millions of dollars in bonuses, I am further mystified.  I know the conventional answer - these people are paid for their knowledge, their business acumen, their leadership, their ability to see into the future, etc.  That is all well and good, but the size of these payments is beginning to stretch the credibility of these answers (and I am even less able to explain bonuses for the executives of failed businesses).  After I accept that this is just the way things are done these days, I ask myself how in the world these folks can spend these amounts of money and why they feel that they need more.

I am conservative, but even I think that, if you look at the relative remuneration of executive and labor, things are getting out of balance.  It used to be that the "common man" resented the "Robber Baron."  Carnegie, Rockefeller and that crowd took an "unfair" amount of "the pie."  Labor Unions came to the "rescue" of the "working man" and fought the good fight to restore the balance.  Today, most of the evil companies are not owned by individuals.  They are publicly owned.  Today, the evil-doers are perceived to be the executives not the company owners (because we are the owners).  Like the Robber Barons before them, all these executives want is profit and they don't care about the "little people."  Let's pause a moment and ask why these executives are so focused on profits.  The most important single reason is that the stockholders (us) demand it.  If a company does not generate enough profit, we move our money to one that does.  The board of directors then fires the guy that failed to generate the necessary profits and pays a huge amount of money to the guy who promises to fix the problem.  Voila!  Instant stupidity, but who is to blame and what do we do about it?

One of the things that we do not do about it is to continue to support the liberal policies of a government that attempts to "level the playing field" and "spread the wealth around."  To do so is to replicate the problems that currently face Europe today and have destroyed every single government in the history of the world that has attempted to implement them.  We have a system of government and an economic system that is less bad than any system that has ever been tried before in history.  It is not perfect.  We need to tune it up to meet our current challenges - not destroy it.  In order to accomplish that objective we conservatives need to join the discussion realistically not just yell louder than our political opponents.