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As a result, the middle class loses the political battle and either opts out (what I call Voluntary Poverty or simply collapses into penury, joining the underclass.

It is important to refute one of the state's primary emotional points of leverage in demanding an ever-larger proportion of national income: we need this to help the poor. A close examination of the roughly $3 trillion Federal budget and the $1.5 trillion budgets of local government reveals that programs which directly alleviate the direct consequences of poverty such as hunger and lack of shelter (food stamps, now called SNAP and Section 8 housing vouchers, for example) are essentially trivial percentages of all government outlays.

For instance, the entire food stamp program (SNAP) serves approximately 30 million people at a cost of just over $30 billion—a mere 1% of Federal outlays. Section 8 Housing Vouchers costs about $16 billion—less than one-half percent of Federal outlays. The entire Housing and Urban Development department which also serves the homeless is about 1% of Federal outlays.

Add in programs with successful track records like Head Start and at most perhaps 5% of all tax revenues and government borrowing actually directly aid the poverty-stricken. So where does the rest of it go? To behemoth programs like Medicare ($600 billion and rising at double-digit rates year after year), of which private analysis suggest 50% is waste and fraud, and a huge percentage of the balance either harms or does not improve patient health.

It is, however, very profitable for pharmaceutical companies and other vendors. Consider that approximately 1% of the citizenry control 2/3 of the productive assets of the U.S., and the question cui bono--to whose benefit are $4.5 trillion in taxes levied? Is quickly answered: not the poor. Sadly, the poverty-stricken are the "moral justification" simulacrum marketed by various Elites to justify their own stupendous take of ever-rising state revenues and debt issues.

The Artifice of Political Ideologies

From this long-range cyclical perspective, the artificial nature of political ideology is starkly revealed. The Right focuses all its attention and ire on the insatiable appetite of the State for more power and revenue, while the Left focuses all its attention and ire on the insatiable appetite of the Plutocracy for increased privilege and wealth. Unknown to the ideological adherents, each is one side of a single coin.

While the Left focuses on the plight of an underclass distracted by the "bread" provided by the State and the "circuses" provided by the Mainstream Corporate Media, the Right focuses on the diminishment of rights and income which results from the State's ever-increasing taxes and regulatory powers.

Neither side sees that the insatiable appetite of the State and Plutocracy for larger shares of the national income are one in the same. As both are blind to the causal structures, each seeks to defend its chosen champion (the Left--the State, the Right--the Plutocracy) from the slings and arrows cast by the ideological "opponents."

A handful of Revolutionaries fantasize about the underclass grabbing power from both the State and the Plutocracy, but since the underclass is by definition not productive enough to tax, there is little to entice the middle class to join their revolution. For they foresee they will have to pay for the costs of the "revolution" just as they carried most of the weight of the old State/Plutocracy. This is the classic "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" situation in which a new Plutocracy simply replaces the old one.

Libertarians, in their haste to focus on the rights of the individual to unfettered political and economic liberties, fail to notice that the Plutocracy is delighted to encourage their focus. For a nation of subservient debt-serfs can exist quite peaceably in a low-tax State dominated and controlled by a Plutocracy.

Indeed, a semi-feudal State founded on debt-serfdom has the luxury of offering generous political and economic