Quote of the Day (Thomas More, on the Rich)

“When I consider any social system that prevails in the modern world, I can’t, so help me God, see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich to advance their own interests under the pretext of organizing society. They think up all sorts of tricks and dodges, first for keeping safe their ill-gotten gains, and then for exploiting the poor by buying their labor as cheaply as possible. Once the rich have decided that these tricks and dodges shall be officially recognized by society—which includes the poor as well as the rich—they acquire the force of law. Thus, an unscrupulous minority is led by its insatiable greed to monopolize what would have been enough to supply the needs of the whole population.”—Sir Thomas More, Utopia (1516)

(This year would have been particularly bad in any case for any GOP Presidential candidate attempting to run in the wake of a worldwide financial tsunami. But it’s a sign of the Republicans’ cluelessness that they’re invoking the tired trope of “class warfare” and “socialism” against the Democarts. What was the intervention to save the major banks from their own epic folly but a form of socialism? For that matter, what was the sainted Ronald Reagan’s invocation of “welfare queens” but class warfare from the top down?

At first, I thought of not identifying the author of the above passage and seeing who Republicans might say it was. Whether they would said Karl Marx or Barack Obama, they would be sure to believe the author was fomenting “class warfare” and “socialism.” They’d be all the more surprised, then, to discover these words were created by a man now regarded as a hero of conscience—and, in an age the GOP increasingly regards as being riddled with “secular progressives,” a writer who was canonized.

“Utopia” is a pun on the Greek words for “no place” and “good place,” and there are certain aspects of life in More’s fantasy that are so authoritarian that the great English lawyer-politician-Renaissance man could only have been employing satire. But this particular passage has the ring of truth. As a lawyer and judge, he knew how to see through the “truths and dodges” that came before him, even in an age of capitalism only in its conception period. We know now where “insatiable greed” has brought the world. The real question is, how many times are we going to have to relearn the same lesson? When will we turn “the force of law” against “the conspiracy of the rich”?)