“Self-interest” is a symptom of a slavish mind

Thanks to The Republic of T., I came across this editorial by David Bromwich in The Huffington Post: Parable of the Poor and Rich Plumber.  It hits on many of my concerns regarding the manner in which the US population is approaching politics these days, particularly in the red states of the former frontier.  (And by frontier, I mean the edge of the officially colonized territory, back in the day before the native Americans had been killed and pushed off their land.)

One of these concerns was hammered home by a reactionary litany typed by a right wing ‘libertarian,’ sprinkled with American flags, kittens and crosses, not to mention a Harley Davidson, and circulated amongst those that consider themselves “real” Americans and consider the rest of us to be unworthy of the rights accorded to us in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Specifically, that concern is the idea that a person can function as an individual, or perhaps as a nuclear family unit, without any participation in a community and the notion that one does not require any communal services or government support to get by in life.  I have heard of these people: they live in the middle of nowhere and have no access to education and healthcare.  The man that wrote this email will be fine with that until his children can’t get jobs and he develops cancer and nobody is around to support him.

[Emphasis mine. Please read the whole article, it's worth it.]

…Obama in Ohio spoke the language of American democracy, which has always included a perception that wealth is a form of power, and that stupendous inequalities of wealth produce an undemocratic inequality of power. His questioner, angry in anticipation that he could not hold onto all of the $300,000 he might hypothetically earn in a year, spoke the language of righteous self-interest; and he cited as his irrefutable authority “the American dream.” If I follow that dream, said the Joe of today, hoarding the wealth of the Joe of tomorrow, why should I ever pay a higher tax?

Obama’s answer was simple and Christian. Once you have been helped by a tax break to prosper and to grow relatively rich, it seems fair to give others lower down the ladder the same chance that once helped you.

[snip]

That the prosperous employer should assist the beginner was a natural corollary, for Lincoln, of his understanding of non-slave labor. Selfishness or, as he called it, “self-interest” was a symptom of a slavish mind, and incompatible with the high morale of democracy.

If this attitude makes Obama a socialist, then so am I, and so was Abraham Lincoln.  Although we live in the so-called land of opportunity, to me, opportunity means the chance to live a good life, for all of us, not just some of us.  I think our government should make that goal its focus, rather than encouraging every individual to hoard the cash that it gets its hands on.  I’m not necessarily saying that we should “spread the wealth” or institutionalize hand-outs, but I am saying that part of our civic duty should be to ensure that the inequality between rich and poor in this country does not continue to grow.