Listening to Obama speak recently, I was struck by the likeness of social status to the ability of an individual to control his own live without having people interfere. It seems he is aiming at reducing some of the problems of the current mis-balance but I can’t be sure if he knows why the middle class is so important.
This is why I think is why the middle class is so attractive:
In the UK we have a more complex system of class, a more traditional class, that has everything to do with breading and nothing to do with much else. Forget that kind of class.
But there is a relation between what you can effectively leverage and your social status, below is a small diagram of my view of this correlation. It shows that a person must own himself and be healthy in order to have any freedom at all. Those with nothing are slaves, children, prisoners and in some countries, wives.
So there is an attractiveness to get everyone hovering between the Lower and Upper Middle classes, where they can effectivly control their own lives. But I don’t count people with highly leveraged housing as middle class, only once you own the majority of your home is it fair to call it yours, until then I’d think you were just working up to it with loans.
I’d also suggest that the top bracket is a very dangerous goal, controlling others and their lives is not really that moral. If you can’t give a share of the profit to all employees, then what are you doing? Taking from one person who did the work, to pay someone else who did nothing. That can’t be right in any sensible system.
If you can’t take sufficient profit from selling a home, then why be in housing? Renters like employers of typical companies are taking liberties from those in our society that have the least amount of control over their lives. Sure my views are about as palatable as Avocado, but I’m not going to stop looking for a fairer society just because the current crop at the top find the current system just peachy.
Here it is:
I’m probbably dead wrong about the correlation, but I’m sure there is something in the freedom of a man in relation to his ownership over his own life in the modern world.