Hiroshige II (二代目 歌川広重, Ni-daime Utagawa Hiroshige
A Picture of Prosperity: America (Amerika shin no zu)
(1861)

"We had better believe we're capable of succeeding, or we've already lost."

Prosperity presented a problem for the captains of industry, for they relied on a tad more desperation in their workforce than Prosperity could provide. Give a worker union wages, and they might start to get ideas that they were more than merely created equal, but equal in more than a metaphorical sense. They’d insist upon something called Collective Bargaining, as if the rabble could comprehend the ins and outs of managing a competitive corporation. They’d surely vote for endless pay increases for themselves, while the shareholders, the real keepers of capitalism’s flame, would become second-class corporate citizens, forfeiting some of their fair share of what were rightfully all their rewards. They were, after all, the investors! Prosperity encouraged a mindset intolerable to the dedicated capitalist, for it equated labor with its natural superior. If capital weren’t king, would everything become a matter of voting? Shouldn’t owners have the final and deciding say?

The strategy was to somehow convince the newly and potentially Prosperous to vote against their own interests. The propaganda machine set to work in overdrive, creating memorable and misleading memes chosen to poison popular conceptions of governance and economics. The resulting mish-mash included native racism to set the classes against each other from within a system originally conceived as classless. Our constitution disallowed a king, but we could bring one into office through popular acclaim. What better strategy than to start characterizing every king in waiting as a man of the people, a natural populist regardless of the millions they’d accumulated in business? They also promised what only the very wealthy had ever cared very much about before: Tax cuts as the primary key to a Prosperity (that never actually could be.) The illusion was powerfully attractive. Society became highly reactive. The story became that each penny claimed by We, The People, amounted to highway robbery FROM YOURSELF! And so the Polity became decidedly self-destructive.

Prosperity started disappearing as the nation’s wealth steadily climbed out of reach for most people. An infinitesimal few percent ended up holding the vast majority of what might have been Prosperity had it been more properly disbursed. The proffered solution could only make matters worse. Tax cuts cost more than they ever saved, but they came cloaked in a fiction so often repeated that it became unquestionable gospel. The trickle-down theory was never more than a cruel and rather unusual insider joke. Its primary promoters knew good and well that it couldn’t work. It would take an economic ignoramus to believe what these people touted, but the magic of repetition seemed to resolve what mere intellectual inquiry couldn’t. We became a nation dedicated to starving the Prosperity out of ourselves, for all of the highest-minded of reasons. We were exercising our freedoms, primarily the absolute freedom to at least attempt to violate the fundamental laws of physics if we chose to. Are we not the indispensable, exceptional nation?

Contrary to popular misconceptions, there can be no exceptions to any fundamental principle. Either we were all created equal or none of us ever were. We wouldn’t have to choose between this false dichotomy if the wanna-be kings had not so successfully convinced the least of us that we were better than anybody ever actually gets to be. We believed we could be kings and thereby rendered ourselves paupers. We believed that we should never have to contribute our fair share to supporting our shared community, and rendered ourselves lonely and unprosperous as a result. We took arrogance to new lows and celebrated where we arrived as new heights. We finally elected an incumbent who has proven, as if he already hadn’t before we elected him, the most economically ignorant anti-Prosperity President in the history of imagination. He busies himself solidifying degrading fiction into actual policy, or, failing that, phony presidential proclamations quickly overturned in the courts. He pretends to be king while undermining whatever foundation any monarchy requires to sustain its reign. Tariffs and tax cuts combine to undermine whatever Prosperities his Polity might have imagined he’d provide, when only they, The People, could have ever provided them.

We have become allergic to paying our taxes. The act that more than few others first solidified ourselves as a nation became more than merely a solemn obligation of every citizen, but the very glue capable of holding this nation together. As one of his first acts as President, George Washington focused not on cutting taxes, but on enforcing the law that insisted upon collecting them. Resistant citizens in the Western regions protested the imposition of a tax on whiskey, a product they literally used as currency. They thought the federal government was awfully usurpy to take a portion of their livelihoods when they were just trying to survive as best they could. Washington’s point was that if we were to survive as a nation, we’d each have to contribute something to the common sustenance. Freedom in that newly freed nation could not manifest as the freedom from contributing something to taxes. Federal troops brought down the rebellion and resolved the first great crisis this nation faced.

We face an even greater threat to ourselves today. Rather than a few moonshiners protesting contributing to the commonwealth, we have the wealthiest corporations and individuals steadfastly insisting that tax cuts represent the potential Prosperity of this once great nation. The lie has metastasized and will not be cured by inattention. We will need to conduct major Surgery on ourselves. We will need to somehow cut out the poison with truth. We will need to vanquish a powerful propaganda machine without the hope of a counterbalancing, centrally controlled opposition machine of our own. The truth might not need to be so studiously crafted, but it cannot simply stand up by itself. If we desire Prosperity, we will not be able to insist that anybody simply give it to us. We’re going to have to devise a way to unbrainwash ourselves and face the hardest truths any society has probably ever had to face. We did this to ourselves. We’re the only Polity capable of recovering our Prosperity. We had better believe we’re capable of succeeding, or we’ve already lost.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz