My Response to Salon's "America’s middle-class defeat: How Canada shamed the wealthiest nation on earth"

“I don’t understand why anyone has to earn more than $200,000 a year,” he said. “I mean, honestly, what are you going to do with all that money?”

The words coming from Tom Power's mouth is right on the ball, says this blogger. And he's true. The United States is home to some of the world's worst income inequality, made worse with our lack of universal healthcare, lack of paid maternity leave and generally anti-labor attitude.

One Salon article could explain America's cultural behavior that is destructive? Culture isn't usually a bad thing, but in the case of Pax Americana, it might be. I'd say we need to as a nation take drastic measures before we turn into the Roman Empire circa 400 AD. But could Edward McClelland's statement shed some light?

Beneath Canada’s contemporary advantages, though, are historic factors that make it a more equal society than the United States. No. 1 is the fact that the nation is too far north to have supported plantation agriculture. Because of that, Canada never imported slaves, and never created an economic structure whose success depended on the permanent exploitation and marginalization of an ethnic underclass.

Could America's own past be why we have a perpetual attitude towards class warfare? Actually, it makes perfect sense. Americans are often oblivious to their own history, and I know this all too well, and eery for a history, I've had to be corrected on one occasion. Call me crazy, but I think that The Communist Manifesto should be mandatory reading for high school students, or if that's too radical, then at least something that is labor and economic related. George Santayana was correct in his saying: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And apparently that's a chunk of America's history.