Gabler on Class Conflict

As Neal Gabler’s “Class Dismissed” (Opinion, Jan. 27) suggests, class warfare was over and done with in the U.S. years ago and, through distortion, distraction and misdirection, the wealthy won the war. Wealth accumulates in the hands of a few, while most struggle to pay off their debts. The irony is that the primary function of our national and local governments, as they stand today, is the protection and production of wealth.

From the U.S. military to the local fire department, our tax dollars are spent to protect corporate interests and the interests of those who least need protection. Even when a fire department saves a home owned by a typical middle-class family, it is the wealth of insurance companies that it protects. Perhaps income taxes should be abolished and wealth taxes instituted. That seems to me to be a more equitable way for the government to raise money. Those who benefit most should pay most.

Michael J. Farrell

Canoga Park

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For years I have been saying the middle class is being eradicated. Gabler stated, “The middle class will keep losing ground.” I used to consider myself substantially middle class. Now I am being pushed into being one of the poor, with the unfortunate circumstance of not being poor enough, yet not being affluent enough, to obtain services and benefits I need or would like. As far as deciding to make my fortune, it seems that time has eluded me, no matter what efforts I have put forth.

I continue to put one foot in front of the other, while losing ground steadily, and see no solution. This administration only cares about enhancing the fortunes of corporations and, in doing so, continues to squeeze people like me out of the picture.

Marsha E. Huberman

Los Angeles

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Gabler’s column bemoans the loss of “class conflict” as though it were one of the great, uplifting political movements of modern times. While I feel no unhappiness over its apparent lack of current success with the citizenry, I do feel that Gabler is being somewhat disingenuous when he states that “we don’t hear that kind of talk anymore.” In point of fact, fomenting class warfare has long been a key element of the Democratic Party’s playbook and remains so today. The difference is that today it is better known as the politics of “victimization.” No one is responsible for his or her actions or lack of income or lack of status because we are all at the mercy of the malevolent actions of the wealthy and powerful.

Government, according to Gabler, is the “only instrumentality that could possibly remedy unfairness,” presumably through taxation, which Gabler supports as a “tool for correcting an imbalance.” Government is supposed to make life fair? I thought that government was supposed to use taxes to protect us from terrorists and maybe fix the roads. I didn’t know that social engineering was part of the agreement.

Rick Newell

Trabuco Canyon

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Gabler’s fine article helps explain the demise of the troika of big government, big management and big labor that kept this country in equilibrium from the Depression through the ‘60s. The demise of labor and the capturing of government by corporate America have reduced the system to a monolithic holding company. The brainwashing of the American public was no less systematic, albeit more subtle, than what we have seen in foreign regimes.

When the unemployed, non-unionized laborer argues that he/she is a capitalist, there can be little hope of change.

Mayer Gerson

Northridge

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Gabler laments the loss of class warfare as a political issue of our day. With condescension, he describes a middle class that has undergone “a national brainwashing” because it doesn’t press for higher taxes on “the rich.” Quite possibly the middle class understands that greater taxes would mean its members’ jobs would be at risk and not some “luxury yacht” for a multimillionaire.

Kevin Moore

Westlake Village

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Gabler is right, of course. The myth of the self-made man has been peddled by everyone from Rockefeller to Reagan. And Americans have swallowed that myth whole, choosing to believe that they’ll be the one in a thousand to win the working-class lottery. But in the face of an ever-widening chasm between the rich and the rest, how long will that myth forestall social revolution?

Unless the wealthy accept their responsibility to the society that fostered them, America is doomed to become a land of gated communities and slums. The price to reverse that march to madness is not great, but the wealthy must pay their fair share.

If they won’t do it voluntarily, government (meaning the rest of us) must force them.

David J. Martin

Ottawa, Ontario