Are the American People obsolete?

In a provocative essay, Michael Lind wonders whether the American rich need, among other things, the American markets and American labor.

“Offshoring and immigration, then, are severing the link between the fate of most Americans and the fate of the American rich. A member of the elite can make money from factories in China that sell to consumers in India, while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of several homes around the country. With a foreign workforce for the corporations policed by brutal autocracies and non-voting immigrant servants in the U.S., the only thing missing is a non-voting immigrant mercenary army, whose legions can be deployed in foreign wars without creating grieving parents, widows and children who vote in American elections.

If the American rich increasingly do not depend for their wealth on American workers and American consumers or for their safety on American soldiers or police officers, then it is hardly surprising that so many of them should be so hostile to paying taxes to support the infrastructure and the social programs that help the majority of the American people. The rich don't need the rest anymore.”

While some of Mr. Lind’s arguments feel like satire and some are simply too cynical to warrant a serious discussion, many make sense, especially the one on the lessening importance of American labor, though technology-led innovation is still where the American rich would need the American middle class. Nevertheless, the entire essay is worth reading.

I was wondering how many of these arguments would apply to India. Via gated communities, exclusive schools and foreign hospitals, the Indian rich have successfully insulated themselves from rest of India, but they still need ordinary Indians as protectors (army and the police), the market and a supply of labor. There’s an additional need: since most rich Indians are politicians, or owe their riches to the rent-seeking system our politicians favor, they also need ordinary Indians to vote them (the rich) to power.

One would expect that being elected by the poor would make the rich sensitive to the concerns of the poor, but as the experiences in the past two decades have shown, being elected to power (even to the position of a petty MLA) is a ticket to unimaginable wealth. The Indian democracy thus becomes a system where the poor elect the rich to protect and enhance the interests of the rich.