In pure capitalism, the rich get richer because “it takes money to make money.” They buy stocks and bonds, expand factories and charge the lower class more and more for basic necessities simply because they can. “It’s just business.”

On the other hand, the poor live paycheck to paycheck, and if the price of bread or gas rises 15 percent, they have to cut back on one or the other.

As a result, the rich are getting richer, in part, because the poor are getting poorer if no one (i.e., the government) interferes. It’s simply the way capitalism works.

Historically, the U.S. has tried to avoid that, even though it trots out capitalism as if it’s mentioned somewhere in the Bible. The short-term problem is unfairness, but that’s not a real problem. It’s more of a moral issue.

The long-term problem is that pure capitalism doesn’t work at all over the long term, even though it works really well over the short term.

If 99 percent of the population has nothing to lose, it gets testy. The people bristle when they see the billionaire set living a life of lavish luxury, putting cronies in political office and passing behind-the-scenes laws that help only the rich. Over the years, they lose all hope of a better life someday.

Then these disgruntled masses get uppity when they can and violent if they must. In France, the beaten underclass – so afraid that unfairness could return – lopped off the heads of the aristocracy to make sure the evil stopped here. Ask Marie Antoinette how that went.

However – and it’s a big “however” – that means the federal government has a vested interest in helping the poor and using tax dollars to do it through educational credits, food subsidies and housing subsidies. It means that feisty independence Americans love has to take a back seat to government services that look like charity.

It’s more than a discussion question. In December 2015, the Pew Research Center reported that the American middle class dropped to 49.9 percent of the population – less than half of all citizens – for the first time in many decades. With stagnant wages, rising costs for everyday goods, it’s getting hard to make ends meet. Add that to a rising number of rental homes and rental costs going up many times more than the level of inflation, and it’s not only the poor getting poorer, it’s the middle class too.

And a brief scan of CEO salaries suggests that the rich are getting richer.

But back to the question: Should the U.S. do something? Or do more? Helping poor people at the expense of rich people amounts to social engineering. It requires someone (a politician, no less) to decide that individual Americans should have X-amount of money even if they don’t give that much value to society. And after they do that, politicians have to figure out a way to make it work and how to pay for it.

Bottom line: Someone in the government must take money from the rich and give it to the poor, like a modern-day, computer-operated Robin Hood. Even people who agree with that type of system have to get a few spine tingles from the “politicians will decide how to do it” part.

So the U.S. is screwed if it ignores the struggling masses, and it’s screwed if it tries to create a system to maintain a middle class.

In short, the U.S. is screwed. But if we start by accepting our screwed-ness, we’ve taken the first step to achieving the ideal balance: “Screwed as little as possible.”

© 2016 SmithTakes.com