Content area
Full Text
With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough
Peter Barnes
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2014
There is a weather pattern that is common for summer days in Denver, Colorado. The morning will start with a clear cobalt-blue sky, most often with only the smallest of clouds appearing over the mountains to the west. Clouds begin to build up as the morning progresses, so that by mid-afternoon there are thundershowers, some of quite ominous appearance, spotted over portions of the plain. This reviewer remembers the pattern well: as an eleven year old in the spring of 1946, he loaded his bike with Denver Posts and headed out to throw them door to door. It rained every afternoon at exactly that time. It was a day and age when the newspapers didn't provide plastic sheaths for their carriers to place over each paper, so we can well imagine that homeowners had to dry out their papers in their ovens.
The expression "a cloud on the horizon" is often used when referring to a portent of much larger developments to come. In With Liberty and Dividends for All, Peter Barnes is dealing with a subject that is of the highest importance for American society and for which the first clouds appeared long ago. We see this when he cites Thomas Paine as someone who more than two centuries ago made essentially the same points he is making now. Since their early beginnings, the clouds have been building up, accumulating backers who have grasped the same concepts. A forecaster now might well say there is "a high chance of rain," with conditions ripe for the ideas to reach fruition.
There have been socialists who have long endorsed the same ideas, but now the increasing polarization of wealth and income, the decline of the American "middle class" after almost a half century of stagnating wages, and the alliance of politics and business to form what many see as "crony capitalism" are conditions that are bringing a growing number of non-socialists - supporters of limited government and a market economy - to believe that the ideas will be vital to the successful operation of capitalism itself.
What are those ideas?
The concepts are...