It’s like a cancer eating us from within, but there is a cure.
The destruction of inherited class distinctions served to mobilize an entire population to achieve to its highest levels, and brought a much larger proportion of our population to its highest level of productivity compared with our cousins in the European homeland. For the first time, ordinary Americans of European descent had the ability to build for a long range future, and work to ensure their children had greater opportunities than themselves. To top it all off, the Bill of Rights, at least in theory and quite often in practice, created a system that ensured liberty and justice for all, and protected a citizen’s property and effects from abuses of a government controlled by a handful of individuals. These ideas energized the new nation. While our brethren in Europe were struggling under the yoke of a vast aristocracy that they later replaced with the even more destructive yoke of socialism, we in America were experiencing the greatest levels of class mobility ever seen on earth.
Our Constitution even ensured that inventors and thinkers wouldn’t have their ideas and inventions stolen, by guaranteeing them a period where they could exclusively use and profit from the products of their mind and imagination. This fostered an environment that inspired Americans, no matter how humble their origins, to be the hardest working and most innovative people on earth. The results can be seen in history, and all around us even today.
But inventing a new philosophy or changing a law doesn’t change human nature or the psychological traits that have been expressed by people of European origin for millenia. Class mobility is not only the exception rather than the rule in all human societies to this very day, but a departure from known European history. Strict social stratification has been a prominent feature of European societies since such societies existed, and as such a philosophical and legal change such as that wrought by America’s founding fathers will ultimately succumb to the weight of history and revert to prior methods unless it is vigilantly guarded and energetically maintained. — John Young