The *REAL* reason conservatives hate democracy

Previously I've asked, "what is the problem with a free people in a democracy voting to tax themselves to pay for healthcare?" One thing I've discovered on Twitter is that if you really push and nudge a conservative, pointing out to them that the majority in the US voted for Obama and his agenda including Obama's campaign promise of universal healthcare, they will finally admit that they hate democracy.

The question is, why do they hate democracy? They give nonsense answers. For example, they say "the majority will vote to take the wealth away from the producers of wealth". But in any economy, the majority are employed workers who are producing wealth with every widget they make or every widget they sell or every medical treatment they provide. At which point things start getting clearer: They're afraid that the PRODUCERS of wealth might take some of that wealth back from the PROFITEERS who make billions off the labor of others.

In any modern economy, scale dictates that the majority of people will be working for others. A semiconductor foundry costs $5 billion dollars to build and employes hundreds of people. This means you will need a bunch of people with a lot of money to invest in order to build this thing.

But once it is built, then every single dollar produced by the semiconductor foundry is produced by its workers and by the sales and distribution people who move its output to where it's needed. The executive class and the ownership class are not producing any wealth at that point. The owners are simply taking the wealth that others produced in exchange for the initial startup capital, while the executive class is merely defending the owners' interests and doing the transferring of wealth to the owners. The problem is that in our economy, this process has gone whack. See this graph:

As you can see, the pay of the executive class has skyrocketed over the past thirty years by comparison to that of the producers of wealth, the workers who actually create and distribute the products that the executives are profiting from. And this is matched by skyrocketing wealth of the ownership class, the top 10% of Americans who own 90% of America:

In a democracy, the producers of wealth -- the workers of companies without whom companies would have no product to sell and no way to ship it -- would vote to redistribute wealth from the owner and executive classes to the producer class in the form of desired government services such as healthcare, in the form of additional benefits such as more weeks of paid vacation in a year, and in the form of increased ability to bargain collectively for higher wages. In a democracy, the producers of wealth would redistribute wealth from those who profit from their production of wealth to those who actually produce wealth -- the actual workers, without whom companies have no product. And in fact, if you look at functioning democracies such as Sweden (the most democratic nation on planet Earth according to the right-wing journal, The Economist), you will see this in action. Sweden taxes the executive and ownership class heavily in order to provide services such as free education from preschool all the way through graduate school, free healthcare, and so forth to the workers, the actual producers of wealth. Thus Sweden's income distribution looks quite different from the U.S. income distribution:

In other words, the reason conservatives hate democracy is because democracy is inherently socialist -- i.e., the worker majority in a democracy will inherently choose to tax the ownership and executive minority classes in order to redistribute the wealth created by workers back to the workers that created the wealth and out of the hands of the executive and ownership classes that are profiting from the labors of the workers. As the example of Sweden above shows, they will still allow the executive and ownership classes to keep enough of the income produced by workers so that they're still making more money than the workers. But it's more like the 2x of worker income that characterized the U.S. economy in the 1950's and 1960's, not the 4x+ of worker income that is true today.

So there you have it: Why is democracy hated by conservatives? Because it transfers wealth to the producers from those who profit from the labor of the producers. In short, because it is exactly the opposite of what conservatives claim socialism is when they claim socialism transfers from "producers" to "leeches". CEO's truly are leeches -- they produce not a single widget, design not a single piece of software, in short, they produce nothing yet profit from the labors of those who do produce everything that the company sells. Without the workers who design the products, who assemble the products, who sell and ship the products, the CEO has nothing, less than nothing since he has no skills that could be useful other than the ability to spew bullshit. Yet this small collection of leeches benefit hugely from the labor of the workers who design and create the products that they profit from. This isn't to say that we don't need CEO's. As I pointed out previously, the CEO is fundamentally the guardian of the interests of the ownership class, and responsible for making sure that the ownership class gets a return on their investment in the business. But clearly we don't need CEO's making 400x what workers make, and clearly American democracy is broken when that's happening. Which we already knew... otherwise the workers, who are the majority, would have already voted to tax CEO's to the point where they were making only 20x what workers make again. Democracy. Eeep! It's garlic to those who profit off the labor of others!

-- Badtux the Democracy Penguin

BTW, this is a huge refutation of the notion that Hitler was a socialist. Hitler liked to throw around socialist jargon in order to ingratiate himself to the German people, but his actual actions were to impoverish the workers and enrich the ownership class. One of Hitler's first acts, on May 2, 1933, was to outlaw labor unions and make strikes illegal -- one reason why prominent Republicans of the 1930's such as Prescott Bush loved Hitler. Worker income fell throughout the remainder of the 3rd Reich... according to the Reich Statistical Office, they declined from 20.4 cents an hour in 1932 to 19.5 cents by the middle of 1936 for skilled workers, and 16.1 cents to 13 cents per hour for unskilled labor. The share of all German workers of the national income fell from 56.9% in 1932 to 53.6% in 1938, while capital and business's share rose from 17.4% to 26.6%. Nazi Germany in short was the opposite of democratic socialism -- it transferred wealth from the working majority to the ownership minority, rather than from owners to workers as is true for democratic socialism. Hitler's "national socialism" may have thus been "socialism" in name, but certainly was not modern socialism as practiced by Sweden and other democracies in practice. (Note: All figures courtesy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, which of course is not available on the Internet but you can check it out of the library and check page 264 for yourself).