<em>“A nation’s productive—and moral, and intellectual—top is the middle  class. It is a broad reservoir of energy, it is a country’s motor and  lifeblood, which feeds the rest. The common denominator of its members,  on their various levels of ability, is: independence. The upper classes  are merely a nation’s past; the middle class is its future.”</em>
<strong>-- AYN RAND, "The Dead End"</strong>

It isn't often that I would quote Ayn Rand, the patron saint of the greedhead crowd, about anything. So much of her work is about catering to the producers among us that I've never felt she had any relevance to the common man.

But this quote, from one of her later, lesser works, seems to show a different sort of thinking.

[caption id="attachment_741" align="alignright" width="200" caption="America&#39;s true Atlas is the middle class."]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/rockefeller_plaza.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-741" title="rockefeller_plaza" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/rockefeller_plaza-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" /></a>[/caption]

And as much as anything, it illustrates why our country made it through the Great Depression and doesn't seem to be doing as well with the Great Recession.

In the 1930s, when country after country in Europe was falling to fascist, totalitarian governments, the United States didn't. That's largely due to the fact that the American working class didn't consider itself working class, but middle class instead. Karl Marx wrote of the proletariat, but millions of Americans who fit Marx's teaching to a tee actually considered themselves middle class, or bourgeois.

If you were to ask 100 people of the street where they thought they fit in, 90 of them would say they considered themselves middle class. By contrast, when folks in England were polled on the same question, fully two-thirds said they considered themselves "working class."

So what is "middle class?" The <a title="Middle Class" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class" target="_self">definition</a> seems to have a lot to do with lifestyle, and in this country particularly with home ownership. People who are middle class are those who have more of an emotional investment in their community and more of an interest in that community doing well and prospering.

One of the biggest problems we seem to be facing these days is that too much wealth has shifted away from the middle class. Since the mid 1970s, middle-class wages have been completely stagnant. Meanwhile, the flattening of income tax rates and other policies designed to favor the rich have resulted in an incredible amount of wealth being shifted to the top.

Maybe every bit as big a problem has been a change in the way people view debt. One thing that used to be widespread was a great pride people could feel in not owing anyone anything. Now we have incredible consumer debt, and it isn't just mortgages or car loans. As of March 2010, the total amount of revolving debt in this country (98 percent of which is credit card debt) was $852.6 billion.

In households that have credit card debt, the average debt is $15,788.

The middle class is going down for the third time, and when that happens, much of the glue that holds America together will be gone. For all the eagerness to dismiss folks like Saturday's Arizona shooter as anomalies, but more and more, we're seeing that Henry David Thoreau was right. The mass of men <em>do</em> lead lives of quiet desperation, and when they become desperate enough, they become much less quiet.

If one thing is true, it's that being rich doesn't necessarily make you smart, and America's rich have always overreached. That's why it's so ridiculous to see people who have more money than they could spend in 96 lifetimes object to paying a reasonable amount in taxes or paying any estate taxes at all.

They may not realize it, but they're killing the goose.

And when it's gone, we'll feed on each other.