I find you unduly cynical, actually. For many years I too bought the trickle-down argument. It did after all seem to make a lot of sense and for while, after Margaret Thatcher's reforms of union power and state intervention the UK did seem, as a whole, to be doing better. I think many of the people who espouse the trickle-down theory do so in good faith and it is not all nonsense by any means. Free market capitalism is in principle a good way to allocate resources, since customers "vote" with their money for what they need most.
People have a natural human tendency to inhabit comfort zones that justify their own way of life. It takes real effort to find out how others live and see things from their point of view. I am as guilty of that as anyone. Demonising "capitalists" is not sensible in my view. There is still this lazy stereotypical myth of the fat man with the top hat and the cigar, off to the races. But in reality, anybody with a pension plan is a "capitalist". That includes most people that belong to a trade union, for a start. And also people like me, who were middle managers in a corporation.
I think that a Keynesian style system with strong labor unions and a resolute commitment to workers' and consumers' rights would be a happy medium which could allow capitalism to continue to exist in its basic form. We seemed to be heading in that direction in the late 40s, 50s, and 60s - and America's economy flourished and our standard of living improved by leaps and bounds.
It was certainly good for business, good for capitalists. But at some point, the Powers That Be didn't want that any more. They had a good thing going, and they decided to louse it all up. That's when Reagan came on the scene. He wanted to "fix" something that wasn't even broken. I don't know if it was the same with Thatcher or what the state of affairs was in Britain at the time, but not only did Reagan louse up the economic system, he also led a resurgence in US warmongering which appeared to decreasing in the intervening years of the late 70s after Vietnam.
Believe me, I don't really want to demonize capitalists, and I don't think I'm as cynical as all that, although I'll admit that I might come across as a bit frustrated because after years and years of debating topics like this with pro-capitalists and other conservative ideologues, I can never get anything resembling a straight answer from them on anything. It's like having a religious debate with an evangelist.
If they'd just be honest and look at the problems in our society objectively, then I think sensible, mutually-beneficial solutions can be found. That's how things would ideally work in a democratic, lawful, cooperative, and politically harmonious society.
The problem now is that we don't seem to have much political harmony these days, as you might have noticed. There are a variety of reasons for this, but economics is generally an underlying cause in most political discord that happens - even if it may be dressed up as something else.
In the UK what, in retrospect, was overlooked by people like me in prosperous London was that the North, S Wales etc were deindustrialised painfully and market forces did NOT act through Schumpeter's "creative destruction" to replace the jobs lost with ones of similar quality. What we got instead was a lot of delivery fulfilment warehouses, call centres, McJobs, part time working and zero hours contracts.
What I think we have learnt, in the UK, is that the market can't just be left to get on with it if you want to avoid pockets of deprivation in the country.
A lot of the same thing happened in the US. There has been some concern about this, even if one doesn't really care about the plight of the workers or the lower classes. It's about the diminishment of the US industrial base to the point where we've grown increasingly dependent upon foreign manufacturers for just about everything we use. If we were suddenly cut off, what would happen? (And given the uncertain state of world affairs at present, who knows what could happen?)
US schools are lagging woefully behind in math and science, when compared to the rest of the industrialized world.
This isn't just about "bleeding hearts" crying for the poor or those who have been thrown out of work, nor is it about "class envy" as others might charge. There are serious questions about whether this is a wise policy for the country as a whole.
In the US, you do raise an issue we don't have in the UK, namely the moral judgement that the poor have only themselves to blame. The UK class system, which we inherited from the Norman Conquest, has always made it apparent that we don't really live in a meritocracy. People are not as a rule blamed for being poor, as it is generally understood that if you come from a poor background, in an area with no decent jobs, it is pretty hard to break out of that. Continental Europe - which also has or had an aristocracy - is the same. The myth of living in a true meritocracy is very much a New World thing, it seems to me.
I think a lot of it is rooted in propaganda that many have been raised in and conditioned to believe. It's a significant part of Americana - the stories of rugged individualists who went into the wilderness and made their fortunes purely off the sweat of their brow. Of course, significant parts of the story tend to get left out, since that would somehow taint the mythos that we've built up about ourselves and our political/economic system that we're all raised to worship.
My sense is that Europeans tend to look at things differently largely because they've faced numerous revolutions, upheavals, and world wars over the past two centuries - whereas the US was largely spared these events - at least in terms of how much happened on our own soil. I think the European perspective has been tempered by that somewhat, whereas the last major upheaval we've had in the US was the Civil War. And in many ways, we're
still fighting the Civil War in the US.
Even capitalists seem to get put off by some of the political factionalism. I've heard some pro-capitalists express their misgivings at being in agreement with conservatives on economic issues, but then find themselves in the same big tent as the religious right and the patriotic right (and further towards the extremist "alt-right" as they call it). They seem to be embarrassed by that. But they seem to fear the dreaded "socialism" more than they fear Bible-thumping patriotism and quasi-nationalistic militarism.
As I said, I don't demonize
all capitalists, especially if you expand the definition to include people getting a pension. In that sense, one could say that everyone who votes is a "politician," but when we speak of the "politicians," we're generally referring to those who hold influence and power over society - just like the wealthy capitalists. When I refer to "capitalists," I'm referring to the big shots, the movers and shakers - not the small fry.
