Balzar on Wealth Disparities

John Balzar takes on a topic so difficult in “Executives Get Rich, Workers Get Peanuts” (Commentary, July 29) that even he misses a few of the reasons working people don’t seem to get too upset over our widening class divide. First, the American dream suggests that complaining over class stratification is sour grapes. In other words, our economic fate is not the result of our own decisions and massive impersonal forces, but simply our own decisions and aptitude. The taboo against bringing up class in polite company is based on one of the great American myths: that this is a classless society. This myth has its roots in the ideology of Lockean equality that animated so many of our founding fathers and the anti-socialism of the Cold War. Nevertheless, we are a class-stratified society.

We are left with an unrealistic belief that the ideals of political equality so eloquently expressed in the Declaration of Independence are the basis of our economic environment. Wealth all too often equals political power. And political power is the device by which a complaint against unjustifiable inequality can be articulated for all to hear.

Gregg Beytin

Westchester

Why the overwhelming majority of citizens, whether in ancient Rome, Jefferson’s day or today, tolerate such blatant and harmful maldistributions of wealth and income is indeed the fundamental question that, if carefully considered, as Balzar does, can lead to rectification. Such inequality negates the possibility of a truly functioning democracy. And only an informed and truly functioning democracy can peacefully put an end to this societally harmful situation.

Robley E. George

Director, Center for

the Study of Democratic

Societies, Manhattan Beach

Balzar and the Wall Street Journal have done an excellent job on a portion of the retirement problem. How about the same analysis in regard to the pension plan for members of Congress versus that for Social Security recipients, for which Congress is responsible? We may find there is more devouring in progress.

Dwight Clark

Orange

Perhaps it’s time to modify how society perceives successful for-profit businesses. Earnings should not be the preeminent measure on Wall Street. Perhaps earnings and employee progress (compensation/benefits for executives and labor) would be a better measure.

Vi Patmas

Mission Viejo