Text of Ken [Complete]

Class Structures of the United States

Michael Zweig describes the American economic class structure as dividing into four main classes. They are the Capitalist Class, the Middle Class, the Working Class, and the Underclass. These four classes are structured in a pyramid like hierarchy with the Capitalists at the top living in luxury and the underclass on the bottom living in poverty. As said by (Zweig 2011, KL 139), "A relative handful of people have great power to organize and direct production, while a much larger number have almost no authority ... The great majority of Americans form the working class ... When we add them all up, they account for over 60 percent of the labor force. They are the working class majority."

Yet with this working class majority, we have not seen the kind of socialization efforts and union support found in much of Europe and at one time in the US. Unlike in the past, America no longer assigns a social position based on race or gender. Class is something that can be obtained by almost anyone theoretically but is less diverse in practice. How much of this is of discrimination and how much of it is simply cultural advantages and disadvantages has yet to really be determined. Yet for more than fifty years Americans have been focused politically on anti-discrimination policies with very small to negative changes in economic freedom in the middle class, working class, and underclass (Uchitelle 2004).

As Stated by (Uchitelle 2004) "For 30 years, the assumption has been that the private sector would generate full employment on its own. It has not, except for a five-year stretch in the late 1990's. Now the situation has become worse. Despite robust economic growth, the private sector is generating fewer jobs than ever in a recovery." The Capitalist Class is by far the greatest bearer of both economic and political power in the US. Downward mobility into the other classes is negated as investors often are using other peoples' money for investment such as mutual funds and both private and public pension funds. Taking a cut when they win, but little or no loss when they fail. But with GDP up and the DOW climbing (Dow Jones 2015), why is only the capitalist class showing improvements in their bank accounts?

Part of the issue comes from divided thoughts on economic principles such as Milton Friedman's Free-Market thoughts from the Chicago School of Economics and the British Keynesian economic model (Conwell 2015, 1). Instead of taking from both schools of thought as needed, we instead tend to cling to Friedman's model due to lingering Cold War hostilities. Major influencers in the US included Friedman, Ludwig Von Mises, and Ayn Rand (Burns 2009, 106,141). Following Free-Market ideals, also known as Mainstream Economic Thought, labor has a subjective market value, thus when the labor pool increases, the value of labor decreases.

The liberation of the working woman, which undoubtedly cannot be denied as a socially and ethically positive change in our society, also had a major drawback of effectively doubling the labor pool, thus effectively halving the value of labor under the rules of Mainstream Economic Thought. While the simple solution would be to simply elect a gender neutral head of household, due to the competitive nature of Mainstream Economics and required growth of capitalism embedding themselves in home finance though real-estate and educational loans, most families instead turn to becoming a double income household (Reich 2014).

One of the places we see Mainstream Economic Thought taking the upper hand is in the orchestration of globalization. As stated in chapter seven of (Zweig 2011), "One indication of this inequality is the different way NAFTA treats capitalists on the one hand and workers and the environment on the other, when disputes arise. If a capitalist feels his or her business interests have been violated under the terms of the treaty, enforcement mechanisms can result in fines and punitive tariffs against the offending party. But worker interests and environmental protections are not part of the treaty." But is there anything wrong with that? Shouldn't each country be responsible for their own internal business regulations? Isn't the idea that that we eventually equalize the world economy, with each country still being able to maintain some sort of sovereignty over their own resources be it land or labor?