Recently, I came across this powerful observation about the ‘American Dream’
” Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humourless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.” (Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater (New York : Dial 1998)
Ah yes, you might well say, the words of a left-thinking burnt-out bitter individual (even one who knows something about economics) who missed out on every money-making opportunity during his/her life. No actually, these words are from Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007), an American writer best known for his satirical novel Slaughterhouse five.
You may well ask exactly what this has to do with left wing economics. As we all know, there is a brutal Darwinism to the American dream that is encapsulated in phrases like ‘The weakest goes to the wall’ and ‘Winner takes all’ and many more that have entered our vocabulary down the years. If you didn’t buy into the neoliberal free market ‘shareholder supremacy’ ethos of American capitalism, you were labelled a socialist or communist. There is nothing egalitarian about the American dream.
