Cleveland Plain Dealer...
The ‘middle class’ will be fine, thanks: Kevin O’Brien
By Kevin O’Brien 

For political purposes, the “death of the middle class” is greatly exaggerated. 

Clearly, it’s a line that played well in some focus group, and Democrats and unionists have been shrieking it ever since. Ohioans have gotten an earful already, and will hear it incessantly as they approach the referendum on Senate Bill 5 this November. 

But it’s a lie, and whatever traction it enjoys is the result of the undeserved traction gained by another lie -- the notion that the United States is a nation of classes. 

The short answer is, we don’t do things that way here. Never have. A class system is one of the things this nation’s founders consciously set out to avoid a couple of centuries ago when the Declaration of Independence formally broke us away from the Old World. It’s one of the best decisions American leaders ever made. 

So “middle class,” historically, has had a different meaning here. It’s a term of convenience borrowed from the Old World as shorthand to describe people who are neither filthy rich nor dirt poor. Unfortunately, in recent decades, it has been allowed to take on a measure of its Old World connotation. 

In the Old World, classes meant something. A person was born into his class, and social and economic constraints made it terribly difficult for him to move from one to another. 

Cracking the upper reaches of the system as an outsider was just about impossible, short of a successful revolution that replaced one ruling class with another. The older the money was, the more respectable. Upstarts were viewed with suspicion and derision because they had quite literally forgotten their place. 

Americans tossed the whole hidebound structure aside when they prosecuted a successful revolution that was not only political, but also economic and philosophical in nature. 

We chose freely -- and wisely -- to “classify” people according to their ability, not their ancestry. 

We chose the polar opposite of the class system: individual economic freedom and mobility. We chose the uncertainties of rough-and-tumble competition and churn over the stultifying stability of the Old World. 

So when people refer to the “middle class” -- or any other “class” -- in America, the understanding should be that they’re talking about something fluid and flexible. 

Using the American connotation, the term “middle class” truthfully can apply only as a snapshot, and even then the picture is fuzzy, because the people in it are in constant motion. 

For every Bill Gates climbing toward the top of the economic heap, there’s some Carnegie or Vanderbilt headed back the other way. Our system rewards industriousness, intelligence and good ideas. It doesn’t give a fig for surnames. 

Obviously, there’s a downside to competition and churn. In competitions, not everyone comes in first. With churn, the possibility of falling exists alongside the possibility of rising. 

But that’s not death. That’s life, adapting and evolving as better ideas come along. That’s the car key putting the buggy whip on the shelf. All of society adjusts accordingly, but no one adjusts more than the person who can no longer earn a living making buggy whips. 

If Ohioans are wise enough to vote “yes” on Issue 2, thereby upholding the law known as Senate Bill 5, state and local governments will be free to do some things in different ways that suit today’s economic realities. 

Some people now on the public payroll will have to find other uses for their talents. But none of them will be asked to do so the morning after the election. 

And we’ll have to come up with better ideas for running some public institutions with smaller staffs and leaner budgets. Other institutions eventually will go the way of the buggy whip. (Given the debt situation across the board, that’s an inevitability, with or without Issue 2’s passage.) 

So, yes, significant changes lie ahead for public employees and their agencies. 

But to even suggest that a “yes” vote on Issue 2 could, by itself, produce some material change in the composition of the “middle class” is to insult today’s public employees by casting unfounded doubt on their ability, their industriousness and their willingness to support themselves. 

The case against Issue 2 is emotional, and it cannot bear logical scrutiny. 

When Ohioans vote in favor of Issue 2, they won’t be voting to end fire or police protection, because they themselves will decide how best to allocate public resources. Nor will they be voting to abolish public education. And they certainly won’t be voting to kill the “middle class,” whatever it may be at this moment. 

Read it at the Cleveland Plain Dealer