Malefactors of great wealth are out for control
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) is former labor secretary Robert Reich’s personal favorite. After his tenure with the Clinton administration, Reich taught public policy at UC Berkeley, so one sees why.
Reich posted a delightful, 4-min. YouTube video on Tuesday in which he uses the film to illustrate lessons from the film teaches about the relationship between working people and the rich. Reich derides Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), the wealthiest man in Bedford Falls, and his bottom-line view of the world. Potter treats working people like “cattle,” says George Bailey (James Stewart).
The Potters of the world, Reich argues, should see working people as “assets to be nurtured and developed rather than as costs to be cut.” A strong working class is the foundation of a thriving economy. The rich would be better off in the long run with a smaller share of an economy growing rapidly than with a larger share of one growing more slowly because working people earn too little, barely make do, and have too little to spend.
That makes sense as an economic argument. But it’s not the entire picture. If it were, the Potters of the world, including our rising billionaire-oligarch class, would have figured that out without Reich’s help.
Our 21st-century Potters concern themselves with making money, yes. They have no need for more. They have enough to last, the saying goes, until the sun burns out. But money is also a proxy for power, and power is the real game. Wealth gives the rich power over the lives of the “rabble,” as Potter calls them in the film. Mr. Potter didn’t need any more money. He needed to see George Bailey ruined and the rabble he helped prosper kept in their place.
Wealth is how the rich keep score. And it enables “malefactors of great wealth” to dominate and reshape the world as kings and emperors do, unbothered by the wants of their communities. Other people are raw material, costs to be minimized.
Over the holidays, many families will play Monopoly, the classic, “multiplayer economics-themed board game.” From the Wikipedia entry:
The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903,[1][9] when American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie created a game called The Landlord’s Game that she hoped would explain the single-tax theory of Henry George as laid out in his book Progress and Poverty. She devised the key features of the game. It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies. She took out a patent in 1904. This shows the game’s characteristic features of a square circuit consisting of corner squares (one the starting point) and a series of intervening spaces where players went round and round until the game’s goal was reached.
And what is the game’s goal? To accumulate as many pieces of colored, fake currency as possible? To create the virtuous cycle of wealth creation Reich mentions? No. One wins Monopoly by economically dominating other players into submission and ultimate bankruptcy.
See Jim Stewartson’s commentary on The Dark Enlightenment and its goal “to replace the government with a patriarchal, feudalist, white supremacist oligarchy.”
The alleged benefit of this new post-democratic world is a futuristic utopia of abundance where a small technocratic royalty will provide everything for the serfs [and] decide everything for us—even if we don’t like it.
The Reich video misses that.
Happy Hollandaise!