Deciding Whether To Be Equal

LOUIS BRANDEIS, who served on the U.S. supreme Court from 1923 to 1939, once said: "you can have democracy, or you can have economic inequality, but you cannot have both." Brandeis never clearly articulate which he preferred. It a difficult choice, to be honest. For the sake of his legacy, let us assume that he wanted democracy and economic equality, rather than plutocratic oligarchy, which is what we have, and what we have always had. brandies was doubtless fully aware of the prodigious price our society would have to pay for actual democracy, and that he surrounded to the inevitable plutocracy. We must further conclude that we the American people prefer inequality and an undemocratic political system, for we acquiesce to it without much complaint, although every so often the meager beginnings of social and economic reform appear, only to wither away beneath an unassailable mound of vested interest money. We give lip service to inherent, classless human equality in America, and we give lip service to our cosmetic democracy, an illusion perpetuated by our ever potent gift of self deception. We pretend that we have democracy, and that everyone's economic status is self inflicted, just, the wages of hard work and smarts, or the lack thereof. Its all a lie, of course. The system is rigged for the wealthy, by the wealthy, and of the wealthy. Plato, in ancient Athens, and James Madison in ancient America, both wrestled with this salient question: which do we choose, economic equality and democracy, or economic inequality and plutocracy? Plato choose the former, in his classic book "The Republic". Distribute wealth equally, and political power in an equally equal manner. Madison opted for the latter, along with the other founders, all of whom were men of means. They chose to dispense with democratic government, in favor of rule of the elite wealthy, and to limit the power of government to change that arrangement in any way. Today, we remain content, even the teeming poor majority. Now, however, our inequality of wealth and power has reached grotesque extremes, and there are signs of trouble. The poor are showing signs of becoming aware of their systematic exclusion from the political process. if current trends continue, there will come a time in the United States in which all political power and all wealth in concentrated in a single pair of hands, but let us hope and assume that before we reach this bizarre state of affairs that we will finally do something about it, something to reform our unbalanced and unsustainable social system, one way or another.