Whenever someone talks about taxing the wealthy in this country, something interesting happens.

Invariably, those who oppose such a tax accuse its boosters of engaging in “class warfare.” What’s really interesting is that comes from the same people who, in different circumstances, will tell you there are no social

classes in America. All that’s needed to rise to the top, they say, is grit and ambition and a tug or two on one’s own bootstraps.

Which is, of course, crapola. Class has, for years, been the dirty little secret of this country and culture. The fact is, there’s a class system in this country and it’s getting more and more entrenched.

But we all were raised on the myth of classless American society, so the idea of “class warfare” probably scares a lot of people, even people who aren’t in the class that would be hurt most by it.

There was, of course, a time when class mobility was somewhat easier. I’m a perfect example. My grandparents were illiterate European peasants who

came to this country and built a life that was appreciably better than the one they faced back in Sicily, but still hard. Their children moved into the middle class and their grandchildren, “my generation,” solidified that move (although given the current state of the economy, my generation has to worry about backsliding; personally, I went back to school because I have no desire to become a dirt farmer in Sicily).

But that climb upward was very much a product of its time. My aunts and uncles came home from World War II into a thriving manufacturing economy; they were in Michigan and jobs in places like auto plants were plentiful.

Well, there are fewer auto plants than there used to be. In fact, there are fewer factories of any kind in this country. We now are hip-deep in a service economy, where we deliver to people things folks in other countries make. The pay ain’t nearly as good. And the people who own and run

American companies make so much more than their workers that they barely live in the same universe. There are CEOs who spend more on their golf clubs in a year than I spend on groceries. .And I think that is the problem with the upper class in this country.

Yeah, a lot of them a lot of them are simply bad people. The day Bernie Madoff dies, there will be one less vacancy in hell. But generally, the problem is brainpower. I’ve known a lot of people who weren’t wealthy because they were particularly intelligent. Like my old publisher, rich people often have a tin ear when it comes to how folks will interpret what they say. One of the more amusing sidelights of the Enron scandal was when Ken Lay’s wife tried to garner public sympathy over the fact that they were going to lose some of the several houses they owned. It was an amazingly stupid statement. She rightfully became a national laughingstock because of it, although there was a bitter tinge to the laughter.

There are signs that the ruling class in this country is starting to wise up, at least a bit. There are people like Warren Buffett, who has more money than God, and actually has the grace to note publicly that his tax rate is lower than his secretary's and call on the government to do something about that.

But for every Warren Buffett, there are a hundred Mrs. Lays who just don’t get it that a lot of it that people. There that there are a lot of people who are really suffering out there. Getting some help isn’t a matter of having the money for a private jet for such people. It’s a matter of not worrying about having to live in a homeless shelter.

I suppose this will mark me as a socialist to many of the people that read this, but the question has to be asked: How much money is enough? I’m no Communist, mostly on cynical practical grounds, but like most things the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle here. Yeah, if you worked hard enough to accumulate a pile of money, nobody has a right to take it away from you. But this is a moral question. You also really don’t have a right to keep excess money in a vault in the basement just so you can roll around naked in it, not when other people are seeing their lives trickle away.

For the love of God, would it really hurt anybody if the wealthy paid their share? Would it really be that wrong? In the end, it really would be a good thing, if only because it would be easier for the wealthy to stay

wealthy if the peasants aren’t at their doors with pitchforks.

That isn’t a threat, by the way; it’s prediction from someone who has a reasonable grasp of history. The wealthy in this country need to wise up. It may not take much in the way of brains to make a lot of money, but it

often takes brains to keep it. A smart person knows that inequality is corrosive and once the rot really takes hold, some folks aren’t going to

have the luxury of worrying about keeping what they have. They’ll be more inclined to come after the people that actually have it.