The Case (?) for Class War

Washington's Blog (hat tip Ritholtz) has a post today entitled "Raging Inequality May Cause Unrest and Violence In America and the Rest of Western World". Long and rambling, but a number of good points in Vitus's opinion.

• Warren Buffet, one of America's most successful capitalists and defenders of capitalism, points out, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war ...."
• Raging inequality was largely responsible for the Great Depression and for the current financial crisis.
• Egyptian, Tunisian and Yemeni protesters all say that inequality is one of the main reasons they're protesting. However, the U.S. actually has much greater inequality than in any of those countries.
• Ken Rogoff on elites: “I don’t understand why people don’t wake up to the crisis they are creating,”
• Why Are People So Angry?... Corporate earnings have soared to an all-time high. Wall Street is gaudy and confident again. But the heyday hasn’t come for millions of Americans...The American Dream is about having the means to build a better life for the next generation. But as President Obama acknowledged at a town-hall meeting in May, “a lot of folks aren’t feeling that [possibility] anymore.”

As usual, WB trails off, after many excellent references and points, into so-what-ism: We live in an age in which mankind writ large is becoming politically conscious and politically activated to an unprecedented degree, and it is this condition which is producing a great deal of international turmoil. That turmoil is the product of the political awakening, the fact that today vast masses of the world are not politically neutered, as they have been throughout history. They have political consciousness.