The United States initially developed as a classless society and one without much concentrated wealth. Of course there were plantation owners and capitalists with abundant and surplus capital including human slaves yet the Imperial aristocracy of class caste privilege had been overthrown by the revolution. Caste systems are de facto the basic ossification of social class stratification that develops through a variety of political systems. Christianity and communism each overthrows caste systems through different means. Plainly though Christianity and Communism have each experienced in different circumstances corruption of their ideal of classless society.
It is not the case that free enterprise and democracy preclude classless societies or at least those with a great deal of economic egalitarianism. As mentioned above the United States was founded by revolutionaries that generally were not too far apart in capital acquisition. Many revolutionaries were farmers with small land holdings, or free trappers, laborers, small businessmen, sailors and so forth. Today on the other hand, the United States has developed great concentration of wealth comparable to that of Mexico.
When the United States was far more economically egalitarian than today and wealth not so concentrated entrepreneurs had more access to developing and patenting ideas. Networked wealth did not have a finger in every pie nor the power to franchise business in every state of the union. Class systems develop; caste systems evolve when wealth becomes so concentrated as today.
India and China are interesting to compare. Each have thousands of years of caste systems in their history. There has been a difference between the economic development of the two nations the past eighty years or so. While each overthrew their imperial rulers (Britain and the Chinese Emperor), India kept its caste system intact except for the vanquished imperial class while China went through a communist revolution to try to attain a classless society.
In my opinion nations with caste systems necessarily become socially and economically repressive of a majority of the people. India’s economy developed far more slowly than that of China once the Communist government opened China to investment from the west. Presently China has the world’s largest economy in GDP though not in per capita income. India lags behind though it too has investment from the west. The primary reason is probably the caste system it has informally kept.
Caste systems repress intelligence and ability while promoting those that are positive reinforcement for the wealth of the upper castes. The historian Arnold Toynbee noted that a creative majority become a repressive minority clinging to power sometimes through military means. The challenge for a nominally free society like the United States is defend against over concentration of wealth to keep a semblance of social and economic egalitarianism intact. When every citizen has the opportunity to develop ideas that are environmentally sound or synergetic if they have them, or to patent ideas affordably a society its oars in the water. Repressive minorities based on social castes do not tolerate well competition to business investments and methods from out caste challenges.
Race can be a basis for social castes along economic lines. African Americans obviously were a social caste during slavery and afterward through a variety of means. Even liberal allowance of mass migration of Hispanics to the United States entailed maintenance of caste system attributes and mitigation. Some Americans felt Hispanics were safer and better workers than American Negroes. Hispanic workers were willing to be domestic servants or field workers at below scale wages, while American Negroes were not. The relationships of racial castes were manifest along economic class lines.
California for example has a high minimum wage, and it also has millions of illegal Hispanic workers providing cheap labor notably in agriculture. California has a very real economic caste system that is raced based. If there were no illegal entry workers arriving over the border into California and the rest of the nation whites, blacks and Hispanics would need to be legally employed to perform labor. The wages of labor would rise.
Without so much below minimum wage labor in America produce would cost more and the people would insist that the rich be taxed adequately to pay for public services at the level popularly demanded for a humane social environment and safety net. Increased economic egalitarian would appear unless of course caste leadership was so powerful that they could increase public debt and bring the nation to economic collapse while exporting their capital to safe offshore investments first. The entire whipsaw economic phenomena are elements of changes in caste system dynamics and propaganda concerning them.
It is not the case that the wealthy are the best and the brightest and of great value to the United States. It is also true that communist theoretical social equality can be even more repressive of individual enterprise than that of a free society with too great of capital concentration. For communism it is the dictatorship of the proletariat that is the repressive, sentient nation-encompassing fungus that is an anti-body to individualism. Concentrated wealth alternatively is a matter of big hogs in the barnyard consuming all the best economic slop and intimidating those seeking to go their own way. The largest swine totalize the nation and world, if they can, bringing everything into their own demesne of power.
It require wits, intellect and the grace of God to keep society and the environment in good health.
