Yet, despire these facts, unscrupulous so-called "progressive" Democrat Party politicians who, themselves, came from family backgrounds closest to the bottom now number among the America's wealthiest.
Perhaps the most outspoken and hypocritical among them is now-disgraced John Edwards, whose father began life as a textile mill worker in the South.
Edwards used what had been a modest American family success story in a completely dishonest way to portray vivid accounts of pitiful "lint-in-the-hair" workers who were part of the "other" America he had created for political purposes in order to get union backing for his campaigns.
Edwards had grown up in a town nurtured by entrepreneurs who, unfettered by government regulation and exorbitant taxation, had risked their capital to build and grow a textile firm which caused his community to prosper and provided the incomes for families who, like his own, sent their sons and daughters to great colleges and universities, built schools and churches and hospitals, and enjoyed a quality of life to be envied by most of the rest of the world.
Along comes Edwards, however, with his law degree, silver tongue and thirst for wealth and power and political ambition, and, instead of proclaiming the superiority of the American freedom of individual enterprise principles which had built his community and state and caused his home County to rise from poverty to a place of opportunity, he created his "two Americas" argument to fit into the "progressive" political ideology which, he thought, might put him in the White House. Instead of studying Adam Smith's "Enquiry in the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" and the ideas of America's Founders' he chose to publicize his center to study "poverty"--an apparent act to further his ambition.
His own hometown now constitutes a case study in what has happened across America as a result of government policies which have overburdened the entrepreneurial spirt with policies which have destroyed entire industries and companies which formerly provided jobs and incomes for their communities.
This story has been played out in one or another scenario over and over across America.
As the betrayers of the trust of America's Founders have sought to "progress" us into decline as a nation, loading us with regulations, taxes, deficit and debt, the politicians, themselves, have become wealthier and wealthier tyrants in the land which gave them birth.
By doing so, they may have forfeited the chance to pass on liberty to their posterity.