The Class War

I hear lot of class warfare rhetoric these days. There are haves and have-nots. There are rich and poor. There are public sector workers and private sector workers. There are rich people who don't pay enough taxes and poor people who don't pay any taxes. It is one group versus another. This is what you expect when you have a government that is too bloated, redistributes income, and now contemplates deep spending cuts as the reality tsunami prepares to hit us. If you want to know what is in store for the USA, look no further than the riots in Greece and the UK.

I don't know what I should think about all of this. I am a working class guy. I pay a third of my income in income taxes and property taxes. As a single guy with no kids, I get zero deductions. I read about government bailouts of corporations, and it makes my blood boil. But this is politics. I want to explore a more fundamental element. What do I think of the rich?

I have to be honest with you. When I hear some rich guy whining about what he pays in taxes, I honestly don't give a shit. I'm not rich, and I pay taxes. I manage to live. I don't think it is right or good to have all these taxes. I think eating the rich is a stupid idea. But in practical terms and in an imaginary world where we had a flat tax or no tax, I feel no sympathy for the rich. There are people who work and struggle to feed their kids, and these fucks complain about the high price of BMWs. This is why the working class wants to devour the rich. It is because the rich are out of touch. They are a bunch of snobs who think they are better than the rest of us.



As a libertarian, I fight for rich people to keep what they earned. I also oppose giving them handouts through government subsidies and whatever tomfuckery the Fed pulls. I want to make it easier for them to be rich and to become rich through the free market. But their snobbery makes it hard for me to make that case.

I don't hang out with rich people. You're not going to see me at the country club with the cream of society. If you do, I'll be lugging golf bags or something for tips. But even if I was rich, I still wouldn't be there. I don't like those people. They are not my people.

My people are the blue collar people of America who work each day to earn their living. Are blue collar people better than those rich fucking snobs? Absolutely. There may be dirt under their fingernails. They are rough around the edges. But they do the dirty work that keeps the world going. There isn't a thing you do from operating a computer to driving a car to using a toilet that wasn't made possible by their hands.



Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged made the argument that the capitalists with their brains and imagination are the ones that bring the world into being. If they were to go on strike, the world would stop. This creative class of people are the Atlas upon whose shoulders our civilization rests. As much as I like that book, this notion simply isn't true. It gives too much credit to the creators and the thinkers and none to the workers. Just looking at all of the things in your life shows that the real Atlas of society are the working men and women who make it possible. Ideas are great on paper, but it takes labor to turn paper into reality. The Masters of the Universe quickly forget this fact. Let the workers of the world go on strike, and civilization wouldn't last a day.

Ayn Rand imagined the genius capitalists of the world escaping to Galt's Gulch where they live in their self-made prosperity to let the rest of the world slide into collectivist oblivion. This begs a question. Why don't Objectivists make Galt's Gulch a reality? Why don't they escape to some enclave in the wilderness and build Libertopia? This is because this fantasy is impossible. Every free market economist will tell you that prosperity comes not from single genius but from division of labor and comparative advantage. This is where Rand got it wrong. The moment Galt needed axle grease for one of his creations, he was going to have to get in to a pick up truck made by hands not belonging to him to go into town on a road he didn't pave to buy what he needed from the parts store that he did not build. The fact is that Galt's Gulch would be a hell of poverty if it was truly isolated. It would be the Stone Age.

We owe a great deal to the capitalists and the thinkers, but we owe equally as much to the workers who turn capital and ideas into reality. The problem with so many on the Right and among libertarian circles is that they give short shrift to these working class people. These people are neither appreciated for their work nor for their skills. They are unsung heroes. Yet, for all this disrespect, they take it all in stride. They show up for work each day. They wait the tables in the diners. They fix the engines on the trucks that haul the goods that end up in your home.

The future is grim for the thinkers. The reason brilliant minds achieve what they do is because of scalability and intellectual property. Scalability is what was achieved by the work of many hands producing copies of the original idea. Books required printers. Products required assemblers. Chain restaurants required cooks and servers. But the creative class is now little more than workers themselves.

Edison died a long time ago to be replaced by geeks who use their brains and turn over their work to some corporation. Programmers work for the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others. There are no Hank Reardens inventing great new metals. This is because Hank Rearden had his contract terminated when his creative work was done. This is what the pharmaceutical industry is now. Ideas are cheap and plentiful.

Creative work is there now. Musicians watch as people download their music without paying for it. They must now hit the road and perform as working musicians if they want to make a living. But the music is better. The same is happening in publishing. Newspapers have already felt the sting. Book publishers will be right behind them. The only reason creative people ever got rich is because of protectionism which is antithetical to the free market. Ayn Rand is rolling in her grave. The advocates of IP consider the internet the death of civilization and want it restricted. People should think about that. This shows that IP is not a boon to innovation but an enemy.

I feel that there is a seismic shift in the culture and our economy. If freedom is left to do its thing, I see creative types making on par with auto mechanics. This is because scalable work becomes cheap while nonscalable work becomes valuable. You can't outsource auto repair, but you can outsource knowledge work. You can't outsource farming or plumbing or electrical wiring. Houses are still built by hand. That work will cost more and become more valuable. Even accounting and legal work can be done with programs. Moving furniture can't.

This first wave of reality is hitting today's college grads as they graduate to unemployment and crushing student loan debt. Every one of them wanted to escape being a member of the working class--today's version of hell. The result is that they are now a member of the working class as they pour coffee at Starbucks. Others aspire to the bullshit jobs in management or government that produce nothing of real worth except PowerPoint presentations. This is the Parasite Class, and their days are numbered as well. They are the creation of economic bubbles, but those bubbles are popping with regularity now.

So, who are the rich now? That's easy. The rich are the banksters. Unlike entrepreneurs and real capitalists who put capital at risk, the banksters just move money around taking their fees. They get to gamble with other people's money and stick their losses to the taxpayers. Money is the ultimate scalable endeavor. Coupled with government power, it becomes a monster. We are supposed to love these fuckers for "creating" so much value. Yet, shouldn't they be blamed for destroying that same value?

The bottom line is that working class people get too little respect for the value they create while the rich get too much. I am OK with each class getting their due. I am not OK with one class getting what is not their due at the expense of the other. So far, this is exactly what is happening in our culture. At the bottom of the pile is the American worker. He is portrayed as being a simpleton and a fool, and he is. This is because he doesn't play the grand game of fucking people over that the rich and powerful play. The American worker is portrayed as a chump. Yet, it isn't so much because he is stupid. It is because he is honest. In a world of shitbags, honesty is a vice.

This is why working class people are better than the rich. Working class people don't go around fucking people over. Even when those working class people become rich through their hard work, they retain those values. The rich sad to say are nothing like Rand's heroes in her novels. They are shysters and crooks and often use Rand's writings to whitewash their dishonesty. Yet, their true worth is easy to estimate. What value do you create? How do you make the world a better place? I am still trying to fathom how Goldman Sachs does that.



From a personal perspective as a working class person, I can say that folks like me are generally happy and take it all with a grain of salt. I try to keep a sense of humor about it all. On Blue Collar Street, people might fall to their deaths. On Wall Street, they jump. The bulk of what the rich do is just fodder for our jokes and entertainment for the rest of us. Working class people are a cynical bunch, but they can laugh at the bullshit. Those riots you see in Greece and the UK are mostly students who have rich parents. Union members can be a loud bunch, but they represent a small minority of working people with numbers shrinking by the day. This is because most working people see the union as just another fuck over on the working man. The union is just another slice out of the paycheck.

For the most part, workers know their own value even if others don't see it. They see the rich and powerful as clowns. They experience that rare commodity known as happiness, and this is something that eludes the rich. That is the great mystery of it all. The rich inflate their importance, but they also inflate their miseries. This is why on Wall Street you are a failure if you only make $4 million. Working class people feel rich if they get some overtime. This stuff is relative. I just know I enjoy my days, and I sleep well at night.

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