My friend Simon writes: I was daydreaming today (long drive to and from work) about what would happen the day after the gates closed at the secret compound for the captains of industry at the end of Atlas Shrugged (the premise, of course, is that the working class isnt grateful enough to our noble, generous job-creators, so they all retreat to a secret place for super-rich only, shutting out the world, and refuse to give any more jobs until the workers come crawling to grovel to them). Inside, the power struggles would begin. Some rich people enjoy cooking, but without the lowly, ungrateful working classes, who would wash the pots and pans? (Theres a change a lightbulb joke in there, if I wasnt so tired Id surely find it.) Theyve always had people to look down on who were less affluent than they -- who do they aim their contempt at when everyone there has as much as they do? The ones they can get to do things and fix things, thus equating them with the working classes. And then theres the subject of competence: most rich people havent got much of that. They go through phases of thinking that when the workers do come to beg for jobs, theyll be gracious, then that theyll make them suffer and crawl and really show submission for all theyve put them through. Then they think theyll just ignore them. All the while certain theyre about to appear at the gate. Meanwhile, outside the compound, every bricklayer wakes up the day after the gates close with all the knowledge that he had the day before, and all the tools. The same for everybody else. The infrastructure is there, the knowledge, and the resources. Theres some upheaval, and a few power struggles, but not as bad as Bain inflicts when they buy out a company and sell off its assets. The luxury of fresh vegetables and fruit in the winter mostly goes away because that comes from multinational corporations buying and selling and shipping between northern and southern hemispheres. Without the supercorporations, thats mostly done on a smaller scale for nonperishable goods, but we discover that frozen, dried, and otherwise preserved foods are good enough. Also without the multinationals, the jobs that have been outsourced to countries with lower costs of living are done locally again, so instead of pining without our jobs, Americans, at least, have more jobs, which leads to competition for labor, which produces higher wages, which, in turn, produces more spending, so everybody prospers. It doesnt take long for people to remember that the actual production workers almost always do better for themselves with fewer levels of parasites sucking up the profits from their work. People form co-ops, small companies, and exchanges instead of trying to build more mega corporations. The consensus is that the ultra-rich are nothing but a bunch of blithering ninnies who wear loafers because tying their own shoelaces is hard for them, and making a new pair of laces when the old ones broke would be a crowning achievement for most of them. T-shirts saying Aerosmith was right: Eat the Rich! become popular. Back at the compound, nobody knows how to fix anything that breaks; theyre all tired of the same old clothes, but theres no one to make new ones for them, and theyre getting hungry; some of them may have owned factory in the fields megafarms, but that doesnt mean they could grow a single ear of corn. They may have owned companies that arranged for Chinese people to build machines, but they cant build or fix them or tell what theyre looking at on the inside of one. Theyre so convinced of their superiority that they cant see that theyre dependent as newborn infants on the people theyve locked out, and they begin to think the workers must be sneaking in and stealing or sabotaging, or something. They decide to go out on a reconnaissance mission, to see whos doing it, and whether they are the ones keeping the now-humbled workers from getting to them to beg for jobs. The lowly workers have built a second wall around the compound. It hasnt got gates.
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 03:26:02 +0000