A lot of people think that capitalism is what has made this country great.

It can be a great system of building wealthy countries and making them prosper, but capitalism unfettered by government control leads our country to the situation we had at the turn of the last century and the direction we have been heading for some time: a few super rich individuals and many, many citizens struggling to survive.

If we are to learn anything from our history and the history of other countries in similar situations it is easy to see what will likely happen if we continue down this path. The best example, which we saw our country use in the last century was a strong labor movement and government intervention to change the direction of the flow of capital into the hands of a just few people.

The worst example, and one that has been all to common in other parts of the world, is armed revolution. This solution frequently doesn’t turn out well. Some prime examples are Cuba, the USSR and China. These countries ended up with totalitarian dictatorships and terrible oppression of another kind.

The Arab Spring was an example of armed revolution that was hit and miss at best; Egypt ended up with the military largely in control, Tunisia is still struggling with their elected government and Syria which is still battling a civil war 12 years in.

Our country is seeing a rising labor movement and several state governments enacting minimum wage laws that are more fair and in line with inflation but even these measures fall short in most cases. What we really need is the federal government to take a more active role in wage fairness and corporate greed.

We need only look back to 1980 when there were 13 billionaires in our country and we had the greatest middle class in the world. Currently, with well over 600 multi-billionaires and a steadily shrinking middle class to realize that we have been heading in the wrong direction for some time.

From my perspective it has been the Republican Party that has been taking us down this path that started with the Reagan presidency and continues every time a Republican has the presidency.

People who vote for Republicans are of a mindset that multi-billionaires earn those billions but the simple fact is that all wealth is created by labor. If labor didn’t deliver the goods that Amazon sells Bezos’ fortune would disappear virtually overnight. The same goes for Musk — if all of his workers walked off the assembly line there would be no Tesla electric cars delivered to dealers.

We need to wake up to the fact that we have all of the power because without labor nothing moves, not commerce, not agriculture, nothing, so lets take back our country from the oligarchs in our country and make it a better country for all of our citizens, not just a chosen few. Just sayin’.

Larry Benson

Enumclaw