Speaking of class warfare, a blogger at The Economist has a pretty remarkable-in-its-boldness post on Barack Obama and his assertion that he isn’t perpetrating class warfare with his tax plans.

In a speech in Storm Lake, Iowa, Mr Obama pitched his proposals to more heavily tax high earners as a counterbalance to high levels of economic inequality:

Our tax policy has been skewed toward the top 1 percent and away from the middle class, working class in this country. Reversing that would make a significant difference. That’s not trivial. That’s not around the edges.

Mr Obama claims to be on the side of the working and middle-classes, but I would submit that this sort of tax policy is in fact trivial. It’s electoral public relations. The edges are precisely what this sort of thing is around. Our economy is riddled with a multitude of deeply-embedded structural flaws that allow the well-connected to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us, but nobody will do anything about it. There is a class war in this country, a war between the subsidy barons, the regulatory arbitrageurs, the patent monopolists and the rest of us. Mr Obama is a class warrior. The trouble is he’s on the wrong side.

Well, there you go. The blogger, W.W., goes on to conclude that both major parties are not on our side – a fairly sensible conclusion that it seems more and more people are coming to.