Sometimes the most difficult truths to see are the ones in plain sight.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of U.S. government economic policy, and the related myths spun by the conservative commentator crowd. A basic American psychological trait -- I can get rich, too -- is spun into a society-wide illusion of cowboy capitalism. What makes it worse is that it is we the people who are doing the spinning.

Take, for instance, the mantra of the Limbaugh-listener world -- to promote growth, cut taxes and deregulate. Get government out of the way.

So let's look at some facts.

Airlines were deregulated and now most of the major carriers are in, or on the final approach to, bankruptcy court. Energy got deregulated and we got California blackouts and Enron. Telephones got deregulated and we got WorldCom and other spectacular flameouts. And in every case, the response to disappointing results has been to throw people overboard.

Some history: the greatest exhibition of U.S. industrial might was winning World War II. FDR, well-versed in the ways of wealth, knew nothing would happen unless people had a chance to make money. Costs plus ten percent profit became the rule of the day. The more you worked, the more you made -- all on the 10 percent margin.

Fast-forward to today, where Microsoft currently runs 78 percent margins on its Office Suite. Fast forward to today, where money is more important than labor. Don't think so? Then why is work taxed at a higher rate than capital gains? Why will the Fed shrink money supply to stem inflation even if it results in higher unemployment? Answer: if your power comes from your money, the worst thing that can happen is to see that money lose value. The 20 percent inflation of the '70s was bad for the investor class.

How ironic that the conservative mantra is that letting people make money creates jobs. Last set of numbers I saw, something like 1.6 million jobs have evaporated since Dubya took office. And while we're on numbers, why are different sets of results given to investors and the IRS? And why is it that just a few months after some huge accounting scandals, nearly every company is now reporting results that match the early whisper number?

This theory of leaving the rich alone and letting the free market take care of itself used to be called "trickle-down economics." We've seen two decades of it now, and being a specialist in recent history, I'd like to argue that the results don't nearly match the myth. Census numbers show the rich have gotten richer and the middle and lower classes have stagnated. Manufacturing jobs have vanished at an alarming rate, and the retail and service jobs created in their place offer less for workers, but more for stockholders.

This process is called "creative destruction" in economics parlance. The theory is that the benefits to all from buyng cheaper Taiwanese TVs is greater than the loss to a single company town. I wonder how some frontier free thinker like Carl Sandburg would see it. His hometown, Galesburg, Ill., is now on its way to ghost-town status as $15 per hour Maytag workers are losing their jobs to $2 per hour overseas workers.

Another mantra of conservatives, and a nother staple of our individualistic capitalistic myth, is that unions are bad, that they tilt the balance of power in unsettling ways. And in the last couple decades, the percentage of union jobs has plummeted; losses in union manufacturing jobs have not been matched by successful union organizing in emerging fields like IT (a prime example of ruthless cowboy capitalism).

Labor gets blamed for 70s inflation and current-day anti-competitiveness (longshoremen) and greed (airline pilots, sports figures). This being the South, and no place for a "Norma Rae" Union Now moment, all I'd like to say that it is probably not coincidental that while union membership shrunk, the gap between the wages at the top versus the bottom exploded.

Lawyers have done a better job of organizing the shareholder class than unions have in the working class. No wonder Enron collapsed -- in 2000, management took $1.4 billion in compensation and paid only $973 million in profits. No wonder people started sniffiing around. The balance of power was out of whack.

Throughout American industrial history, the biggest company in America (General Motors, for instance) always paid above-average wages and benefits. Wal-Mart broke that trend; it's 1.3 million employees, on average, make $2 an hour less than unionized grocers, and reportedly more than a third of their employees can't afford the company's own health insurance. Mr. Happy Cost-Cutter can now, through sheer market clout, squeeze manufacturers like it has squeezed labor costs.

In recent history, we have seen the passing of a '40s-style moral capitalism and its replacement by a "bidness is bidness" amoral form of opportunity capitalism. It is now perfectly acceptable for two people side by side on an airpane to have paid ridiculously different amounts. I have never understood why people put up with this. It's always struck me that any pricing not connected to cost is just "taking somebody," as folks would call it.

To sum this up, I believe the long-term effects of these sort of wage and job-securiity trends are, at best, under-appreciated, and at worst, cynically manipulated by the monied classes. A low interest rate will not get a person to buy a house if that person doesn't have a job. To use the old cliche, at some point you're not laying off employees, you're laying off your customers.

The latest bit of mythology from the conservative wing is the turning of the term "class warfare" into a four-letter word. Anybody opposed to tax cuts for the rich (fact: eliminating the tax on dividends would save Bill Gates $40 million per year) is engaged in class warfare; you know, it's the old liberal idea of using taxes to redistribute the wealth.

Fact is, the numbers show the monied elites have been engaging in class warfare for decades. There has been a redistribution of wealth -- toward the rich. Business keeps all the profits and it's up to governments and people to bear the societal costs.

What a feat to accomplish without anyone noticing or squawking.

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G.L. Marshall wishes to expand upon a postscript posted elsewhere: War strategist Sun Tzu preached that deception was a key part of war, and that good generals win their wars without battles.