And before you ask: In practice, the middle ground between class warfare and letting upper-class elites make the decisions is known as letting upper-class elites make the decisions. Nothing real is really going to change unless and until those elites are deeply, genuinely scared – indeed, it’s hardly a change worth making unless it really scares them, that’s how you tell. And it has been a very, very long time since they have been really scared.
Its days like this that I LOVE to read places like the Free Republic. The amount of heads exploding is so deliciously delightful to watch! 
Let say the game isn’t rigged, say that intelligence and ambition are the keys to wealth in America. These are the virtues we are most proud of? Intelligence isn’t a virtue, intelligence is a characteristic, like being tall, or having blue eyes. A good man with vast intelligence is a blessing to us all, a bad man with the same intelligence is a curse.
And ambition, a virtue? Inspiration, maybe, is a virtue, its similar to ambition. The inspiration of Michaelangelo when he saw the sculpture of David inside a block of marble. The inspiraton of Jonas Salk who refused to patent his polio vaccine, refusing wealth so that his medicine might be more freely available. Not that’s some fucking! inspiration.
But ambition and intelligence directed solely on money? This is what we aspire to? Its the kind of cynicism Oscar Wilde was talking about, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. I’ve seen their ways too often for my liking.
Uhhhhh…if I thought that it doesn’t happen…I wouldn’t have said that we need to avoid/stop doing it, would I? Therefore your statement of what I think is pretty pathetic in its inaccuracy.
The person who loses his job through outsourcing is a “victim” of market forces–also of his own complacency that his value in that market would remain constant. He’s no different from a company that sells the same product for the same price, year after year, ignoring increasing competition from more efficient rivals (and then petitions Congress to erect trade barriers when it starts losing market share).
In any event, such hate-the-rich tunnel vision will solve nothing. If we kill all the rich people, then the next 1% will be the new rich people, and we’ll have to kill them, too, and so forth, until we’re down to the formerly poor people, who will now be rich on a relative basis, so we’ll have to kill them, too…
As I’ve said, the rich are part of society, and any attempt to turn them into the enemy isn’t going to be productive. And a bunch of “99%ers” camped in city parks and bleating that they hated rich people didn’t do much, either, except perhaps clog public toilets and put a burden on police services.
How about the democratic process? That’s how the social reforms that have been implemented so far have come about. And many of those came during an era when people admired the rich rather than demonizing them.
So what? That’s a reductio ad absurdum argument. You and another poster seem to think that upward mobility doesn’t take place in America. That’s a just plain silly assertion, and unworthy of further discussion.
One of the things that progressives have to avoid is making stupid, hyperbolic statements. Doing so just gives conservative demagogues something to latch onto, take out of context, and beat to death.
Cites and everything…
Then how do you explain the actual, real-world social reform that has taken place in the last 100 years or so? How do you explain the advent of universal health care (however flawed)? If the eeeeevil rich were completely in iron-fisted control, little Joey would still be working 60-hour weeks in the textile factory, wouldn’t he?
We don’t need a revolution. We need a continuation of the democratic process, and to move–or lurch–in the direction we’ve been going. Demonizing the rich and igniting class warfare will slow that process down, not accelerate it.
The patently obvious needs no citations. I don’t need to prove that upward mobility exists in America–the burden of proof there rests on the heads of those who make the ludicrous statement that it doesn’t.
lol
Actually, you don’t know jack shit about me, and it’s amusing, in a kind of pathetic way, that you think you do from reading a few message board posts. I DO “rofl” when YOU accuse ME of intellectual arrogance after you make such an off-the-cuff evaluation. Or when you tell me what I have “a right” to think.
I’m sure there is a term for the type of cognitive bias you’re exhibiting, but I’m not going to look it up.
I’m not calling for revolution at this point. I mean “class warfare” in a political-discourse, Overton-window sense, reframing more and more politics in class-interest terms, all while keeping serious discussion of actual revolutionary possibilities on the table at all times, just to keep the whole thing in its proper perspective from everybody’s perspective.
An exhibition of either intellectual paucity or abject surrender.
You challenged me, I provided cites to back my assertion. Hello? The argument isn’t whether it is possible, but how likely. Quit strawmanning, have some integrity.
“but I’m not going to look it up.” Right, clearly not your thing.
lol
Not my thing when the information is tangential to the discussion or irrelevant, true. Especially when you’d have pissed on whatever I said anyway.
You actually haven’t provided ANY “cites” to back up your ridiculous assertion that social mobility in America doesn’t exist. I “challenged” you? You got a bug up your ass is what happened. You didn’t draw the distinction between unlikely social mobility and it not happening at all, and lazily settled for a snarky remark instead.
OK, in your case, intellectual paucity.
LOL.
And don’t embarrass yourself by calling me an idiot. Disagreement with you does not constitute idiocy. For that matter, an idiot wouldn’t have been able to read or respond to your post (use a dictionary and look up the word). For the same reason, you are clearly not an idiot. A complete jerk, perhaps (and I don’t even know that for certain; I’ve only observed your internet personality), but certainly not an idiot simply because you disagree with me. I refuse to call you any names you aren’t entitled to 
Just so you know, altering the text within a quote from another poster is strongly frowned upon around here. You’re okay with bolding a section to highlight what you’re responding to, or removing a passage and replacing with ellipses, but adding “babble babble” might be over the line.
You: As you “recall”? From your extensive research?
Which I then followed with a citation. Even told you what to Google to find more.
Whereupon you moved the goalposts to whether mobility existed at all, which no-one here has disputed.
You questioned my assertion. I easily backed it.
You are either dishonest intellectually, in which case why are you here, or as another posted noted upthread “it’s like you never even read my response”, in which case why are you here? Either way, I think it’s safe to say that with an approach to logic and fact such as you display here, your ignorance remains safe.
And I’m pretty sure I’m not losing any points here for finally calling you an idiot, but note I started out trying to respectfully engage your argument. You started out with the sarcasm, “From your extensive research?”, which I shoved up your ass with facts.