No Class At All

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review does something very few papers on the liberal side would be willing to do. It devotes a full page, each week, to the other side, i.e. to what it calls "liberal commentary". Now, I don't know how the editors choose which commentaries to include -- but I can tell you that they aren't just choosing the worst ones, i.e. the most blatantly and dogmatically liberal ones, to set up as targets. They seem to choose commentaries that are well-written, thought out (up to a point), and that make some good points, even if their premises, logic, and conclusions are seriously flawed. An example from Sunday's paper is an article by Robyn Blumner of the St. Petersburg (Florida, not Russia) Times, entitled "America's middle-class collapse". The notion in this case is that, in these times of economic woe, the rich continue to get richer and (not actually stated but easy enough to infer) the poor continue to get chillun, and the middle class continues to get bitten to death by ducks. Well, we know how the rich are doing because of the art and high-end real estate markets, which have never been better. (Now watch, they're going to start making Dusenbergs again.) And of course the poor will always be with us, as it says in the Gospels. So the independent variable of interest -- the bellwether, if you will -- the coal-mine canary -- becomes, as always, the middle class. We already know that one of the main distinctions between traditional, or Medieval, or ancient, societies and ours is that we have a middle class and they don't. The third-world model, which is still alive and well, is of a ruling elite that basically owns everything, and controls everything, and makes all the decisions, and a vast army of serfs, slaves, peasants, and workers, with the only thing connecting the two being the enforcement or state terrorism arms, i.e. the police and the military. This is, in fact, the model that has served the various communist regimes from the Bolsheviks on so well. The notion is always: "The middle class, i.e. the "bourgeoisie", is not just part of the problem, it _is_ the problem. And it has to be exterminated as soon and as completely as possible." So one measure, if you will, of the extent of collectivist tyranny is the health of the middle class. And if it has ceased to exist altogether -- as in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge -- this is considered a success story for enlightened collectivism. On the other hand, a society with a healthy middle class has a strange tendency to become predominant -- economically, militarily, politically, as witness Victorian England or the United States from World War I on. So, is the middle class a cause, or an effect, of societal success? My theory is that it is both. The middle class -- with sufficient social and economic latitude and, yes, leisure time to think about things other than sheer brute survival -- seems to be an energizing force for a society, especially if it subscribes to what has been termed "the Protestant ethic" -- which is a way of saying "salvation through prosperity". Wrong-headed or not, this is a dominant idea, and has been one, in American society since the Founding. But, of course, there is another idea -- the dark side, if you will -- which is that even the slighest level of achievement or prosperity of one group as opposed to another is "unfair", and a problem to be remedied through things like collectivization, regulation, confiscatory taxation, and the like. Add to which, there is the perennial rap on the middle class of being "bourgeois", and having bourgeois values, and of being complacent, smug, and eager to ignore the plight of their less-fortunate fellows. It is no accident that, almost without exception, the communist revolutionaries of the last 100-plus years all came out of a middle-class background. They claimed to empathize, and be in synch with, the "masses", it is true -- but what energized them was, by and large, a spirit of rebellion against their roots. So the source of all their troubles, of their identity crisis, i.e. the middle class, had to be eradicated, and the sooner the better. Now liberalism, on the other hand, being (as I've said before) "communism without balls", did not see the immediate eradication of the middle class as a top agenda item. It made much more sense to them to put the middle class into a condition of more or less benign slavery, where they got to continue to enjoy their "perks" -- their middle-class status -- and to look down on the "unwashed", i.e. the proletariat, but who nonetheless served as the "cash cows" of society. In this country, the program went into high gear with the New Deal, and hasn't appreciably diminished since. In the classical stereotype, the proletariat is kept mollified with "games and circuses"... and this continues to be the case, especially if you add drugs, rap music, abortion, etc. to the equation. But the middle class has its own games and circuses -- and also its socially- and politically-approved delusional system -- to keep it quiet and avoid unpleasantnesses like "taxpayers' revolts", which are, in any case, quickly put down by any court that happens to be handy. So yes, the man who said that tyranny can only thrive if it is given consent by its victims was right, and more than right, because it turns out he was talking about not only the "wretched of the earth", i.e. the working class, but the middle class as well. Call them also the taxpaying and tax receiving classes -- the givers and the takers -- the producers and the users. Any dichotomy fits, up to a point. The main thing to remember is that no member of either of these classes is ever "in charge". Even the ones who attain high office are still at the beck and call of the people who are really running things.

At any rate... [pause for air]... what is Ms. Blumner talking about when _she_ refers to "America's middle-class collapse." Why, the fact that inflation, the declining dollar, rising food and gas prices, etc. etc. are quickly robbing America's middle class of what little self-respect it has left... and that the truly rich (not just the hyper-leveraged McMansion dwellers in Great Falls, Virginia, but the _really_ rich) are laughing all the way to the bank. OK, fair enough. But let's not forget that the subprime mortgage crisis was caused, almost exclusively, by middle-class people trying to claw their way up a rung or two on the bourgeois totem pole. Like greedy little piggies, they didn't just want "a" teat, they wanted the biggest and best teat. So a few bourgeois values came a-cropper, big deal. But there are ripple effects, as we now know, because so many investment "instruments", world-wide, depended on these piggies for their increase in value. So now it turns out, according to Ms. Blumner, that the American middle class is in a "hunkering down" mode. They feel "vulnerable". Which is another way of saying, they feel like working class people have always felt. Which is a way of saying, they _are_ working class people. In other words, the great leveling process has succeeded, and we now have a two-tiered society, and ne'er the twain shall meet. But is this the fault of the middle class, or the fault of the people who have been bleeding it over the decades, the way the Masai bleed their cattle? I say it's some of each. The middle class has been complicit in its own demise -- mainly by eagerly voting for all the wrong politicians at every opportunity. But middle-class values, which are universally despised by both the proles and the elite -- and most explicitly by the MSM and academia... well, are they really all that bad? In fact, wasn't it the middle-class world view that gave rise to this country in the first place, and which has informed nearly all of its domestic and international policies ever since -- for good or ill? Is not the middle class known for its charitable impulses -- alive and well even in the face of big-government nannyism? And is it not known for at least "wishing well" on our less-fortunate fellow citizens of Planet Earth, even though the well-wishing gets out of hand at times? And mainly, can anyone point out a two-tiered society that has achieved even a small fraction of what ours has achieved? And yet every trend -- economic, social, political -- seems to be pointing us in that direction. So in that sense, Ms. Blumner is right. However! She attributes much of the decline in middle-class fortunes to "the cost of big-ticket, fixed expenses" like housing, health insurance, taxes, child care, and transportation. While not disagreeing with any of this, I feel compelled to point out a few things. For one, the concept of "acceptable housing" for a middle-class family has, let's say, escalated a bit since World War II. Add to this the fact that the people who build and maintain middle-class houses, i.e. the working class, have experienced a significant _enhancement_ in standard of living since then -- thanks to the unions, but to many other factors as well. So the question immediately becomes, is the middle class becoming more "lower" or is the lower class becoming more "middle"? In terms of disposable income, I'd say the answer is more the latter than the former. Now as to health insurance, I can trace a lot of this to the government-granted health care monopoly enjoyed by the AMA and all of its many subsidiaries. If you have a monopoly, where is the supply and demand factor that tends to regulate prices? The answer is -- nowhere. Go out there sometime and try and get a "health insurer" to cover chiropractic, homeopathy, naturopathy, acupuncture, and other alternative medical models and procedures, and see how far you get. So I say, a lot of the health insurance "crisis" is based on monopolism, not on actual value derived from bonafide free competition. And as to taxes -- well, how about starting with getting the hell out of Iraq? And, for that matter, out of the scores of other countries where we feel compelled to have a military "presence"? And let's press on with the social welfare reforms that were initiated during the Clinton (yes, it's a delightful irony) administration. And let's move "toward" -- not at a precipitous pace, given the current state of the stock market -- privatizing Social Security. And let's get government out of the public education business. Not just a little bit out, but out! Out! All the way out! And that's just for starters. Don't forget to lop off the NEA, NPR, CPB, and other leeches while we're at it. Those are not big-ticket items, but they have plenty of symbolic cachet. And how about the "War on Drugs"? I say, declare victory and go home, the way we did in Vietnam. Agricultural subsidies? Please. We need those the way Albania needs King Zog. (These are just a few of my modest proposals. To see the radical ones, you have to make a substantial contribution.)

OK -- to move on with the middle class and its discontents. As to child care -- well folks, if we weren't forcing mothers to "go to business", as my wife's grandmother used to say, through confiscatory tax policies, we might not have such a "child care" problem. The notion, a couple of generations back, of a family with the father working that would _also_ need the mother to work, and thus have to pay child care expenses, would have seemed totally absurd. And we're not just talking about middle-class people here, but working-class as well. Pittsburgh is festooned with thousands of "working-class houses" from the heyday of the steel, glass, etc. industries. These were homes owned by working men, whose wives stayed home and took care of the children. If we see a family like this nowadays, they rate a front-page article in the Sunday paper. They're basically extinct. Now why is this? Admittedly, the unions had a strong hand in keeping the working-class family alive and well. But this was also in the days before NAFTA and other economic sucking chest wounds, when the U.S. was basically self-sufficient and self-supporting, and blue-collar labor was considered honorable, not something to "move up" from (into a bland, meaningless world of lower middle class, white-collar paper shuffling). There is a lot more to this isssue than all this, but I have tried to provide a few clues at least.

And now a word about transportation. The blue-collar worker -- and the middle-class worker as well -- of yesteryear had, in many cities, a rich buffet of public transportation to choose from, the foremost being, in most cases, a highly-developed and reliable light rail/trolley/streetcar system. Those systems were, basically, taken out in back of the barn and shot by the bus companies, aided and abetted by the gasoline and tire industries, and with the full cooperation of the government, in the years following World War II. And the bus companies, unlike many of the rail companies, were monopolies. So the state of urban public transportation in the U.S., which makes visitors from Europe physically ill, can be traced directly to government corruption, bribery, and monopolistic dealings on the part of corporations -- and the residual effects of these shenanigans are still with us, in the form of the sorry state of public transporation today. Add to this the fact that our entire extra-urban landscape after World War II was predicated on universal car ownership and dirt-cheap gasoline, and it all adds up to the perfect storm against public transportation, and for private commuting, which has now started to cost what it should have cost all along, i.e. too damn much. The notion that every working person has a "right" to drive their own car to and from work is a peculiarly American delusion -- and yet it has incredible staying power. But we pay for this delusion on a daily basis, and local governments -- to give them just a bit of slack -- are basically helpless to do anything about it.

So, to sum up (I can hear the sighs of relief out there), many of the current ills of the middle class can be traced to government -- to political, social, and economic abuses and exploitation, corruption, favoritism, and gross short-sightedness. If the free market had been allowed to operate all this time -- I mean really operate -- I don't think we would be seeing problems of this magnitude. And yet, on the most general level, it can all be traced to the original collectivist urge that informs big government -- to take from the "haves" and give to the "have nots". And since the rich are usually way too smart to be taken from, the burden inevitably falls on the middle class. And as more and more "jobs" transition from ones that are actually productive to "government jobs", which aren't, we can expect to see these trends becoming more and more acute. So are we ultimately looking at another Middle Ages/Third World social and economic structure, with the great American middle class being just a fading memory? It's very possible. But at this point, they still have a vote and they could, if they desired, work to reverse all of this. But they are tired... so tired...