‘Enslavement’ of the Middle Class

* Alexander Cockburn (Column Left, Jan. 6) is misled by his attraction to the wrong historical analogy. Imperial China is a better model for understanding what’s wrong with contemporary America than medieval Europe is. We are not so much divided economically into lords and peasants as we are divided socially into power classes: coolies, landlords, mandarins and the imperial court. But for most of us, the real problem isn’t the landlords, it’s the mandarins.

Planners, regulators, facilitators, coordinators, staff aides, commentators, experts, and every other imaginable category of trained, professional, certified public intellectuals and recognized authorities govern all modern “democracies”--and they govern with an iron hand, under absolute and plenary dispensation from the awesome and distant Court of Heaven.

The Euro-American left will continue to be a marginalized and ridiculous political force unless it can somehow learn to see around its Marxist spectacles, abandon its false analogies, and rededicate itself to the ancient Western ideals of personal liberty and social concord.

J. L. JONSSON

Long Beach

* Cockburn describes the sharply lowered earning power of the middle class over the last 30 years, and then presents a class-warfare explanation. He ignores another possibility: We have too many people.

In the period Cockburn is describing, America’s population and the world’s nearly doubled. With a finite amount of land providing food and space for an increasing number of people, competition for resources increases, causing prices to rise and living standards for many to fall.

It is time for governments and churches the world over to encourage parents to have no more than two children. The tax and welfare systems, which both reward childbearing, should be changed. Note that a one- or-two-child policy, followed for one or two generations, will result in a population drop. If we don’t encourage birth control now, we will need to require it within 50 years.

HERBERT G. ROSENBLOOM

Sepulveda

* I’m unclear on why the development of things like computers, a result of “corporate planning,” and something used to investigate the riddles of cancer and unlock the secrets of the universe are “utter failures,” and have provided “virtually nothing of worth.” How was the computer on which Cockburn writes invented and marketed if not through “corporate planning”?

DAVE CAVENA

Pasadena

* The ideas put forth in Cockburn’s commentary are all but completely absent from the American mainstream press. Why should this be so? The people of this country deserve media which provide a balanced forum for all thoughts and ideas, even if they shake the foundation upon which our modern society is built.

It is becoming increasingly evident that the status quo is not working and that serious questions about where we are and how we got here need to be asked, no matter what “sacred cows” are slaughtered in the process.

L. SAVOIE

Altadena