gracchusdixit

The ultimate rallying cry of the right wing nuts who now run the Republican Party is “liberty”.  They used that rallying cry to shut down the government and very nearly drive the nation over a fiscal cliff.  They are still using it to justify their senseless actions to the voters and to themselves.

Personal liberty is among the most cherished of American ideals.  But it is not the only one—a fact that tea party Republicans refuse to accept or acknowledge.

The greatest of the other American ideals is equality—not the elusive and deceptive concept, “equality of opportunity,” but real, honest to goodness equality:  personal, social, racial and, yes, economic.

People like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Paul Ryan perpetually pit these American ideals against one another.   They tell us that we cannot have both and must resist the one to preserve the other.  Indeed, they go further.  They claim that any attempt by government to regulate the so-called free market or level the playing field between rich and poor is positively un-American—a kind of “class warfare” and a violation of personal liberty leading straight to the bottomless hell of “socialism”.  Decades ago, demagogues like Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan used to threaten us with the even more horrific specter of “communism,”  knowing full well that communism never had the slightest chance of gaining any traction in the United States.  Their successors today would do the same if they thought could get away with it.  But even the most idiotic among them realize the bogeyman of communism disappeared so long ago that such a threat would now be laughable.

The claim that liberty and equality are opposing values is, and always has been, an outright falsehood, designed to mask the true agenda of those who insist on the contradiction.  The opposite is true.  The truth is that real liberty is impossible without equality, particularly economic equality.  Wealth is power, and power is an instrument of force.  When wealth is apportioned in grotesquely unequal ways, real liberty cannot exist.

Examples of this simple truth are all around us.

Consider the disastrous decision of the Supreme Court several years ago to treat corporations as “persons,” giving them a Constitutional right to use their riches to influence elections and, for all practical purposes, to buy political candidates.  In upholding “freedom of speech” for wealthy corporations, the Court completely ignored the obvious reality that speech cannot be “free” when it goes on the auction block.  The Supreme Court will soon hear an even more egregious case, in which one conservative billionaire wants all limits on political contributions lifted on the grounds that he should be “free to spend my money any way I want”.  If the Court gives in again to this specious logic, only the highest bidders in the auction will be “free”.  The rest of us will be silenced.

Or consider our fundamentally unequal system of medical care, in which those with money are “free” to buy whatever care they choose but those with no money are “free” to sicken or go bankrupt or die.  In the run-up to the American Revolution, Patrick Henry famously said:  “Give me liberty or give me death.”  Little did he foresee that millions of Americans would, two centuries later, have no other choice.

We’ve heard a lot about the “one percent,” who now own more than thirty percent of the country’s wealth.  It’s even worse than that.

Every year, Forbes magazine publishes a list of the 400 richest Americans.  That’s not “one percent.”  That’s one in a million.  The average wealth of the one in a million on the latest Forbes list is five billion dollars, and their combined wealth is two trillion.  Thus, one millionth of the population has enough money to cover the annual costs of both Social Security and Medicare for three years, enough money to pay off the entire federal deficit for five years.  It scarcely needs saying that they will never be asked to pay for either.

The ultimate reality is that in a profoundly and increasingly unequal society, personal liberty ceases to be a right and becomes, instead, a commodity, which can be bought and sold like any other, purchased by the few, denied to the rest.  Liberty and equality are not enemies.  The true enemy of liberty is inequality.  Until we realize that, we will continue to live in a society that is neither equal nor free.