(I
had actually written the first draft of this before I heard Barack Obama’s
insanely stupid comment that the government had created the middle class by
applying the GI bill after WWII.)
Where
did we get a middle class?
In
the beginning, everybody was dirt poor, and I mean DIRT poor. Now, I’m talking about the real beginning,
before there were enough people to call a “society,” or even a village. Each person had to produce whatever they
needed to live; there were no stores, or even other people to trade with. There was no upper, middle, or lower class.
People
being as fecund then as now, at some point, there were enough individuals that
somebody said, “Look here. I’m really
good at gathering firewood, but I can’t make those dandy badger hide skivvies
nearly as well as you. How about I bring
you some wood, and you make me a pair of skivvies?” (Actually, this is an exact quote. Some translations have it as porcupine quill
skivvies.) Thus was born the idea of
trade and the specialization of labor.
It probably didn’t take long before people were trading all kinds of
things.
This
barter economy went on for a long time because there was no such thing as
money. People traded goods and services
directly for goods and services. Some gradually
amassed more wealth than their neighbors, but the differences weren’t great
because the limiting factor was how much livestock or whatever one person could
manage.
Now
here’s a critical distinction: wealth
vs. money. Wealth is real stuff – goods and property - chickens, firewood,
berries, those nifty badger hide skivvies, clubs, flint knives, etc.. In a village where everybody likes his
yardbird, the citizen with a mess of chickens would be considered wealthy.
‘cause he’s got all that wealth,
see?
Money is something
that stands for wealth. Today, a dollar bill stands for a certain
amount of real, tangible goods. The bill,
itself, isn’t wealth. It is, in every
particular, a universal certificate of
value. A barter economy doesn’t need money.
I’ve
never travelled with chickens, but intuition tells me they’d be a pain in the
butt before you’d gone very far. A
barter economy, in which people trade wealth
directly, limits mobility. It also
limits invention because whether its chickens or hide skivvies, having ones’
wealth concentrated in such commodities is very time-consuming. Also, if you can barter for anything you need,
there’s not a lot of motivation to invent.
Back
to the story. Many years after the
passing of the guy who started trading firewood, somebody came up with the idea
of leaving the chickens at home and travelling with certificates, or chits, as
we call them in the Marines. He’d go to
the next village and strike deal to trade 20 chickens for a camel. To the camel dealer he’d give a chit that was
redeemable for 20 chickens. The camel
dealer would send his lackey to Chickenville.
The lackey would present the chicken chit, and haul the chickens back to
Camelville. As long as everybody
actually had the wealth that was represented by the chits, it worked
great. A pox on the SOB who figured out
he could write chits for anything, whether he had it or not, but it probably
happened fairly early in this whole process.
This
business of chits, or certificates was revolutionary. It allowed people to travel much more easily,
but sooner or later, the camel dealer would have needed to trade for a new cook
pot, which was available in Camelville, but the proportion of the wealth being
traded was odd. A whole camel would buy
one hell of a big pot – or more little ones that anyone could reasonably use –
and trading just a camel’s leg for a pot of the right size would markedly
diminish the value of the camel for later commerce.
But,
wait! The camel dealer has this chit for
20 chickens, and two chickens would get him a perfect pot! So he goes to the pot dealer (different from
modern pot dealers, BTW), and says, “Hey, ol’ Cluckenheimer in Chickenville is
holding 20 chickens for me – see, here’s the chicken chit – and I’ll sign two
of them over to you in exchange for a pot.”
Do
you see what happened right there?
Commerce happened without a single chicken actually changing hands! Brilliant!
Man, did that ever catch on!
Pretty soon, folks were trading chits for everything under the sun, and,
true to human nature, some sharpies started trading counterfeit chits, and even
stealing the real ones. (The convenience
was a two-edged sword; you could hide a stolen certificate for a dozen camels
considerably easier than the camels, themselves.) As Sir Walter Scott would observe later, it
is an ill wind that blows no one some good, and this mischief with certificates
and robbery was no exception. It led to
the rise of a subspecies of HH Sapiens called “factors,” which morphed into bankers.
In
exchange for one chicken, the factor would hold the certificate for the others
and guarantee its legitimacy. These
certificates were the beginning of money.
This development allowed people to accumulate money, rather than the wealth
it stood for. By trading money for
wealth, or even for more money, some people rose above the subsistence level. It was literally possible to have more money than actual, real wealth.
Now
here’s where we get to the point of this riveting drama. For the longest time, there was one class of
people: struggling. Even the best off
among them struggled. After the development
of the rudiments of money, there came to be a class that struggled a lot less. Now there were two.
Eventually,
the specialization of labor and the mobility of the population allowed some,
but not all of the upper class to actually become even more wealthy, and now
there were three. There were the poor,
who struggled with subsistence. There
were the quite wealthy, who had considerable wealth and/or the money that
represented it. And in the middle, there
was a – wait for it - middle class
that had risen from real poverty, but hadn’t attained great wealth. This happened at least several weeks before
the end of WWII.
The
admonitions to take care of the poor that fill the Old Testament stand witness
to this shift. In fact, the Bible speaks
of the rich and the poor as being very distinct from the intended audience of
the Books. This group that was neither
rich nor poor was the “middle class. In
Biblical days, the vast majority of very wealthy people were actually the
ruling class – the royalty, dictators, and high priests – many of whom had seized
the wealth of those who had created it.
This actually created a fourth economic class: looters who existed only
because there were wealthy producers for them to devour.
There
had been a very gradual shift in the structure of human society from the days
of our wood-swapper. The middle class
was not created by the rich, and it sure as shootin’ wasn’t created by any
government! It was created by poor folks
who slaved and worked and saved and took risks and lifted themselves by blood,
sweat, and sheer force of will. Some of
them continued on the trajectory and became wealthy. . The rich didn’t voluntarily build up some of
the poor for the purpose of creating a middle class. The middle class was not created by gutting
the rich and giving their wealth to the poor, and Obama’s statement that it was
is a measure of the man’s willingness to lie through his teeth. (Or of his sheer, jaw-dropping stupidity.)
The
existence of a middle class is an indication of a healthy economy and society
only insofar as its existence proves that growth is possible – that it is
possible to have wealth beyond what is needed for subsistence. The middle class is not a primary, or
essential part of our society or our economy.
It is, rather, proof of the moral substance of our form of government,
and its decline is presaged by the decline of that government. “Preserving
the middle class,” as our president is fond of ranting about, is absurd. The only way to help the middle class is to
leave them alone! If one would increase
the size of the middle class, one should concentrate on eliminating things that
keep the poor from advancing, or, specifically, protect and promote the things
that allowed a middle class to exist.
Two
things, other than hard work, made the birth of a middle class possible. One was the existence of wealth, in the first
place. Careful, now; that’s wealth, not money. A society must be
able to produce wealth sufficient to meet the primary needs of the people, and
a little more for those driven to accumulate.
If a society produces no wealth, there can be no advancement from
poverty. Had there been no wealth to be
gathered, what could possibly have motivated the poor to work like that?
The
second thing was freedom. Freedom
allowed those with the drive, intelligence, and a measure of luck to rise above
poverty. In essence, they had someplace
to go and the freedom to go there. Had
there been no freedom, those in power would certainly not have allowed anyone
but themselves to have any wealth, at all.
The
surest way to destroy the middle class is to destroy those two things – destroy
that to which the people might aspire, and destroy their freedom to build
themselves up by honest effort. Destroying the rich will accomplish both, and
we will be back in that medieval state in which the terms “rich” and “poor” are
replaced with the terms “powerful” and “powerless,” with the powerless living
in horrid squalor while the powerful suck the life out of them in a ghastly
ritual of economic cannibalism.
The
sheer, staggering moral stature of the American Republic has always been proven
by the fact that the rich and the
powerful were two distinct groups. When
the statists have destroyed the rich, there will be only the powerful. The rest of us will exist only at their
pleasure.
And
that, brothers and sisters, is precisely their objective.
