"And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest: thou shalt leave them unto the poor, and to the stranger..." - Lev 23:22, KJV
I am occasionally surprised at life, but rarely do I find myself completely gob-smacked by the result of applied forces. Gravity holds little mystery for me. When I drop an apple, it accelerates towards the Earth at 32.116 ft/s^2. Every time.
So when we have an Economic System whose primary function is to concentrate wealth in the hands of a very few, to the exclusion of the broad segment of the population we call the Middle-Class, why should I be surprised when it does exactly that?
OK, I can hear the caterwauling from here: "Fuck me running, that's all we need...another useless Trotskyist sponge lecturing the rest of us on Economics"
Perish the thought, mate. Furthest thing from my mind. I happen to like Capitalism as a tool. It can be a damned efficient one. And having seen what other economic systems have produced in the way of goods and services, I would prefer that it remain handy in my toolbox.
But one of the results of Capitalism, besides being a crackerjack tool for creating wealth, is the ability of the same tool to concentrate wealth. Not entirely a bad thing, that. Every paycheck I ever got "concentrated" wealth in my pocket. However, my pocket was not the be-all end-all of my participation in the marketplace. I also delivered products and services to my employer, who in turn combined the efforts of several thousand just like me and in doing so added a great deal of value to the end result, if you can call taking half a million pounds of stuff and fashioning that into something that flies value added. We like to think it does.
See, whenever I can take a break from lobbing bombs at Archdukes, I design and build things for a living. Big expensive things. I happen to like doing that immensely. But doing so requires the concentration of Capital for Design, Engineering, Tooling, Materials, Manufacturing, etc, etc. That concentration of Capital makes the big field we need possible, and if everyone is clever enough, a very substantial harvest is produced. And I get my little corner of that field, in the way of good pay and benefits, to boot. Just like those wise old Levites said I should.
I pay a mortgage every month. I have a 401K. I like to buy things and I like them buy-able when I do. I have no desire to don peasant garb, ride a bicycle to work. and queue up for my weekly allotment of beet-roots while The State takes care of all my needs, which they seem to have decided requires ample beet-roots even though I have carefully calculated my weekly beet-root requirements and determined them to be pretty much fuck-all.
Bottom line: I am about the farthest thing from a rock-throwing trustafarian anarchist from Eugene as the scale allows. Archdukes aside.
But I can crunch numbers, and I have a strong horror of bullshit. So when people stagger around like they have just been beaned by a flying beet-root, asking what ever became of the middle class over the last 30 years, my BS alarm starts ringing.
So what happened to the middle class? It was gleaned.
Yeah, gleaned, and the culprit was the efficiency of the tools employed by the top 10%, but mostly the top 1%, of wealth holders in this Country. It was always apparent that the Capitalist Model, devoid of any moral forces from society, really didn't care what it made. Baby Aspirin? Sure, why not. Zyklon-B? Have that ready for you in a jiffy. Capitalism doesn't care...anymore than gravity cares if you are dropping Relief Packages to the starving or Boxes of Kittens into a volcano.
And so what was finally understood by the really really smart ones who don't waste their lives building, or refining, or farming, or mining, or selling anything is this: The real product is the Concentration of Capital itself. Period. The Baby Aspirin, the Zyklon-B, the Relief Packages, and the Kittens really meant fuck-all.
Now, anyone who has ever tried to build something big knows the necessity of bean-counters....and beans. Anyone who appreciates the benefits of Capitalism understands and embraces the role of...well...Capital. You can no more have the wealth creating benefits of a value-added economy without Capital, and the Financial Infrastructure that supports Capital's allocation, than you can have an engine without oil and an oil pump to distribute lubrication where it is needed.
But the oil pump is not the engine. The engine is what produces the benefits of converting energy into work. The oil pump is necessary, but has a subservient role.
And the thing about engines is...they are gloriously inefficient. So is building and refining and farming and mining and selling when there are many players and many fields full of crops instead a few. Because all of those fields have their own corners, so there is plenty left over in all those little plots out at the edges after the main crop is harvested. Enough for a whole lot of people. Creating wealth is a bit messy that way. It is deuce-difficult to follow every nickel & dime and field and furrow and carrot. If someone is not careful working stiffs might get decent wages and benefits. Or at least a few bushel of carrots.
So what do we call all this inefficiency? Well, we used to call it the middle class. And that was the beauty of the thing: Potent enough as an engine to add real value, and create tremendous real wealth, but inefficient enough at concentrating that wealth to support a prosperous middle. 40 hour work weeks are inefficient. Weekends are inefficient. Overtime pay and safety rules are inefficient. Livable wages, health-care, one-worker families, and pensions are all inefficient. At least they are at concentrating wealth in the hands of a only a few. Oh, a little chaos still allows to the rich to get richer, and I for one wouldn't have it any other way. Those Scribes of Leviticus were no Marxists, mate.
But in this new economic model that has, well, mutated into existence over the last three decades, you can take the Holiness Code from Leviticus and go pound sand with it because all the benefits accrue to just a small few. The oil pump now exists as a entity unto itself, not as one to support the engine of the middle-class. That engine, what is left of it, now just serves the oil pump and the oil pump itself just serves the Brahmins.
Concentration of wealth in seemingly ever fewer pockets is the accepted goal now. No more multitude of different and confusing crops and fields. Get rid of those corners. Harvest it all. The engine is now besides the point. And the middle class is pretty much getting nutted because of it.
Our old Economic Engines did real work. They provided real benefits, and for the many, not just the few. Carefully maintained, those engines would deliver those benefits year in and year out for decades and decades. And believe it or not, smart, hard-working people still got rich.
Now our engine-less economic model creates bubbles, it off-shores skilled work, it supplants real free market competition with Trusts, Cartels, and Quasi-Monopolies.
It gleans. It scavenges. It concentrates.
It does not allocate Capital in a way that adds long-term value (i.e. infrastructure, education, etc) but rather creates instruments that have little or no intrinsic value-added function (derivatives, swaps, etc).
If it does deign to actually stoop to the level of making something, do we get an effective cure for malaria? No, we get five flavors of boner pills.
Why? Because that is the most efficient way to concentrate wealth. Does anyone really think that having 40 Corporate Entities battling for market share concentrates wealth as efficiently as two entities that form a Cartel?
Is it more efficient to compete...or just buy and create the illusion of competition through the media?
Is it more efficient to out-think, out-design, out-deliver, and out-work your competition...or buy favorable legislation that will tip the scales in your favor?
If you are creating wealth, the former in all these cases would historically be the better option. When the sole purpose is concentration of wealth, only the latter makes sense. The goal predetermines the choice.
And as a result we have all these dreadful consequences. One might think The League of Evil is at play...but it ain't. I am not a big believer in Evil. I don't think there are more than a few dozen people on this planet who roll out of bed in the morning and announce: "I shall go forth and do naught but wrong today". Everyone else has a reason.
And more and more today that reason is a low-information Middle Class that still worships at the altar of wealth concentration for the few even though thirty years of digging through trickle-down horse-shit has yet to produce a single pony. Even as every damn inch of the last few fields is being gleaned. In a Country where a Rising Standard of Living for all was once a source of National Pride that crossed party lines, we now see the spectacle of the loss of good paying middle-class jobs actually being applauded...and applauded by the middle-class itself...like the citizens of Pompeii cheering each new eruption. We have met the enemy and changed the channel to Dancing with the Stars.
If the only goal of the activity is to concentrate wealth in the hands of a very few individuals...why are we surprised when that is the only result? If everything else we want is supposed to happen as some mysterious, un-named, happy-accident by-product of wealth concentration, why should be be shocked when it doesn't?
And if that means that the backbone and lungs get ripped out of the middle class...well, so be it. Who can blame them? As long as we allow the efficient concentration of wealth as the primary targeted goal of our financial system, then it will also be the only possible outcome. To think otherwise is to hope that the apple won't fall.
To then incentivize the concentration of greater and greater wealth in fewer and fewer hands through tax policies that reward exactly that outcome begs the question: Has everyone in power just completely lost the fucking plot when it comes to Middle Class?
Because here is the kicker: Without a little Entropy, without some Virtuous Inefficiencies...there is, and can be, no middle class. Not in the age of instantaneous global communications, 24/7 financial markets, and an embarrassment of both electronic and human brains dedicated to the task of gathering wealth into a few big piles, not many modest ones. Some chaos and uncertainty is required in the Economic Model to allow for many to share the benefits (and the benefits are many). Without those virtues of imprecision, it is always just 32.116 ft/s^2...time after time after time...and no one should be surprised at the result. Cheers.
PS - When we are discussing an Engine-less Economy, I mean ours (USA), not the World's. If the USA were a society where the effects of not only gleaning the fields, but eating all the damn seed corn for dessert were to impact the ability to create wealth, then it becomes a zero-sum game, and there would be some (one would hope) incentives not to allow a system that so thoroughly concentrates wealth for a few at the expense of many. But it ain't.
Another of the many, uh, blessings of the Globalization of Capital (while Labor is for the most part local and immovable for the individual worker) is that it allows us to not only over-harvest and glean our own fields until the middle class starves, but to continue to harvest foreign fields after it does.