We the People: The Law of Limits

A reader asked why I preface the title of these essays with We the People. I replied in part that I mean it in context the Founders meant it when they inscribed the phrase into the Preamble. His query, though, prompted me think more deeply about who constitutes We the People. I now realize that it’s not easily definable.

Although my definition is far more expansive than that of our Founders, it’s not unlimited. It’s munificent to say We the People includes every American, but unfortunately it doesn’t. There’s a cadre that’s excluded itself from the rest of us.

Their separation is based on one condition of their condition: Wealth, egregiously extravagant amounts that only a percent of the One Percent possesses. As such, it doesn’t include folks who’ve built a sound portfolio for their elderly years and even run-of-the-mill millionaires.

A couple of months ago, that plutocrat class swooned over the news that a certain naturalized citizen became the first trillionaire. I yawned and rolled my eyes.

(Quick: If you made a million dollars a year, how long would it take you to become a trillionaire? The answer’s at the end.)

We live in a world vastly different from that of our Founders. Like it’s been since the dawn of civilization, there were moneyed elites. But it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century Gilded Age the wealth gap became part of the American lexicon. And with it came class warfare.

In an in-depth New York Times essay titled “We’re in a New Era of Class Warfare. Is Change Still Possible?,” Columbia history professor Dr. Kim Phillips-Fein details the history of class warfare. Having been raised in the blue-collar work ethic of Western Pennsylvania, of special note for me was her account of Andrew Carnegie, the immigrant Scotsman who incorporated the Bessemer Process for steel making into his Edgar Thompson Works in Braddock, PA and became insanely wealthy off the sweat and blood of my ethnic ancestors.

Later in life, after expending huge resources to crush workers’ uprisings and prevent them from organizing, Carnegie developed a bit of a social conscious about the working-class poor. Philanthropy became his vehicle. Critics panned it as a feeble attempt to salvage his reputation, but at least it was something, says Dr. Phillips-Fein.  

“What is striking in Carnegie,” she writes, “is not so much the sense of social obligation as his recognition that the perceptions of poor people might matter for his own comfort and the stability of his society.”

Dr. Phillips-Fein wryly surmises “that acknowledgment seems lacking today.”

In days of yore, a gated community was a sign of privilege. Today, it’s almost quaint. The mega-wealthy have moved privilege to cosmic heights. They’re resorting to fortifying their palatial estates with safe rooms, retina scanners, guard towers, and moats. And separating themselves from the hoi polloi, the teeming masses, on island fortresses like Indian Creek Island in Miami, also known as Billionaire Bunker. And it’s having socio-political consequences beyond the obvious moral and ethical conundrum.

Legend has it that in a retort to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s statement about the rich being different from the rest of us, Ernest Hemingway said, “Yes, they have more money.” That never happened. Being the cad he was, Hemingway concocted the story to embarrass Fitzgerald. But in his rush for upmanship, Hemingway exposed the shallowness of his thinking.

To simplify or reduce the separation of the uber-wealthy from everyday people to the size of their wealth is to show the lack of understanding the depth of the problem. Mega-wealth is only the cause. The rest is what androids are made of.

Who then are We the People from my point of view? Those who live within the natural law of limits. Who know what it’s like to live within a budget. Who believe in equal justice and treatment before the law. Who don’t have unlimited access to health care, lawyers, and accountants. Who don’t live paranoic and gilded existences in a sea of earthly treasure within bunker-like fortresses. Who don’t see the less fortunate as less than human or as resources to be exploited.

In short, We the People are the Everyday People Sly and the Family Stone sang about in their 1968 hit.

If you say that you wouldn’t live like the uber-wealthy in a million years, you’d be part of We the People. Besides, there’s about a zero chance you could because even if you amassed a million dollars a year, it’d take you a million years to become a trillionaire.