There are poor people, there are successful people and in between there are bureaucrats. It is not the first appearance of this New Class in world history. At the moment, it resembles a social class that used to exist many years ago in the Soviet Union.
In his article published in USA Today, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor from the University of Tennessee, wrote about the bureaucratic class emerging in Greece and other countries around the world, after the economic crisis.
“Unfortunately, that’s increasingly the problem, all around the world. A recent New York Times piece tells the story of a Greek woman’s efforts to survive that country’s financial collapse. After losing her job, she tried to start a pastry business, only to find the regulatory environment impossible. Among other things, they wanted her to pay the business’s first two years of taxes up front, before it had taken in a cent,” recalled Reynolds who believes that there is currently a new class of people in Greece, who do not rely on their own funds or labor, but their goal is to define funds and labor, to have political control, and the power to control people’s lives.
“In the Soviet Union, the situation was even worse. The problem was that what was good for the New Class — rules, programs, and ever-expanding bureaucracy — wasn’t good for the workers, who mostly wanted enough meat, and maybe someday a new washing machine that worked. But despite the system’s formal dedication to equality, the resources, prestige and a variety of legal privileges flowed to the New Class, not to those the New Class was supposedly intended to help. But sadly the New Class isn’t limited to the Soviet Union or Greece,” noted professor Reynolds.
Similar situations have emerged in the U.S., said the professor, where the poor are treated with skepticism and with programs of questionable effectiveness. The characteristics of this New Class of bureaucrats in Greece and the rest of the world is that they do not wish to come to power, but to participate in the political control.
“But the New Class isn’t just in the government, and it isn’t just about money. Along with the government employees are numerous others in related positions, all of which have something to do with facilitating political control: journalism, academia, the entertainment media. These people tend to have a degree of class solidarity; that’s why the news media overwhelmingly tend to define social problems in terms of government solutions, why academia favors a pro-government-power narrative, and why Hollywood productions have businessmen as villains far more often than bureaucrats,” added Reynolds.
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