Class warfare is real [updated]

People are right. There is a class structure in New Zealand—and in every democracy on which we model ourselves. But it’s a very different one to the class structure of Marxists’s fantasies. The real–life class structure looks like this: those nearest the top of the tree are closest to the dispensers of political favours, while those at the bottom are paying for them all.

It is ever thus, and will be as long as power and favour come out of the barrel of a legislator’s pen.

[Diagram by David M. Hart, from a lecture on ‘The State and the Ruling Class.’ Hat tip Sandrine L.]

UPDATE: What Frederic Bastiat observed of his age still holds true today:

“The prevailing illusion of our age is that it is possible to enrich all classes at the expense of one another—to make plunder universal under the pretext of organizing it. Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways; hence, there are an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, bonuses, subsidies, incentives, the progressive income tax, free education, the right to employment, the right to profit, the right to wages, the right to relief, the right to the tools of production, interest-free credit, [the rebuild], etc., etc. And it is the aggregate of all these plans, in respect to what they have in common, legal plunder, that goes under the name of [modern government].”
         - Frederic Bastiat, “Legal & Illegal Plunder” (The Law) and “The Laws of its Operation” (Economic Sophisms)