Paul Krugman's latest blog post, under the headline, "Do we need the middle class" went down my gullet like some very bad food.  In the post, he writes

"Kevin Drum writes that

One way or another, there's really no way for the economy to grow strongly and consistently unless middle-class consumers spend more, and they can't spend more unless they make more.

"This is a widely held view, and I'm as much in favor of a strong middle class as anyone. Nonetheless, I'd say that in terms of strict economics it's wrong. There's no obvious reason why consumer demand can't be sustained by the spending of the upper class -- $200 dinners and luxury hotels create jobs, the same way that fast food dinners and Motel 6s do. In fact, the prosperity of New York City in the last decade -- largely supported off of super-salaried Wall Street types -- is a demonstration that you can have an economy sustained by the big spending of the few rather than the modest spending of large numbers of people."

You can have an "economy", sure, but what sort of economy is it?  It is the same type of economy we have now; one that Paul Krugman might compare to the economy of many a third-world nation.  It is the economy of the oligarch, a sort of modern day return to the medieval world in which you have the royalty sitting at the top of the pyramid--the misnamed "upper class"--and everyone else, fending for survival below.  It is an economy, all right, but a rather brutal Hobbsian place in which to live and grow.  It is not a place, in fact, in which the "pursuit of happiness" plays a large part.  Most of the people in such a nation are not pursuing happiness, they are pursuing survival, which is a very different thing indeed.

As we await the arrival of Obama in Washington, most of society is hoping it is his and his teams' intention to change the society we now live in into something more like the society we lived in before the Republicans managed to turn what we thought was a free and equal society into a medievalesque oligarchy in which approximately one percent of the people managed to garner 95 percent of the wealth of the nation into their own greedy hands and everyone else was supposed to be grateful and as happy as tithed serfs on the overlord's manor.  It is a strange world the Republicans have managed to construct and keep most of the people of the nation in, all the while saying this way of life is as natural as the changing of the seasons, so what's to complain about?

What's to complain about?  Well, let's not go there.  We know what is wrong.  We know those with power--in America, Power and Money are the same thing--will never freely go back to a world in which we have a progressive tax system designed to spread the wealth of the nation equally across its vast population.  Those whose transport of choice is a corporate jet or private helicopter, will not think there is anything enlightened about the re-building and strengthening of roads and bridges, public transportation or the rail system, good public schools and affordable universities and colleges.  They will certainly have no use for unions, as the Republicans still left in the Senate showed us last week when, rather than actually try to stave off the collapse of America's native-born auto industry, chose to instead try and gut the American auto unions.

There is a lot to change, and the country I was born into, while it no longer looks like a nation in which all men are actually created equal, can become that nation again if it chooses to, and if the leadership waiting in the wings wants it to.  I am counting on its wanting.  I am also counting on Paul Krugman to help us get there, realizing that everything he says does not have to agree with my gullet, especially if it helps me remember what I want or, in this case, don't want.