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Thursday,
April 22, 1999 For those who have asked about Sasha, our Husky, thanks:
he's fine. Abcess on jaw of undetermined origin. Gets 2 big pills and hot compresses every
day, and can't go up the hill for a few days; whenever he sees me with a hat he is at the
door wondering why we aren't going out. It's hard to explain to him. But he is is good
shape, and we're taking him for local walks here in the flat areas. Thanks to all for
asking.
===
I wrote the following over on BIX in response to some specific discussions, but it
seems to have some generality. Think of it as a rant, put out as part of a conversation;
The brutal fact is that most people in the US are
wage slaves in the sense
that they do not OWN anything that would keep them alive without working
for other people. The yeoman farmer who owns his land in fee simple and can
live off its produce hardly exists. The small business man, like the dry
goods store owner or the shopkeeper in a medium town or city, who was the
backbone of US society in the time when I grew up, no longer exists.
WallMart and Free Trade has destroyed that man and reduced him to a wage
slave.
The entire system is set up to to force people either to spend most of
their lives trying to accumulate wealth, or to pursue a 'career' of working
for other people.
The only people who "own" much in the way of jobs are civil servants and
tenured teachers, and they are not what I would call the best candidates
for the independent citizen who is supposed to make up a democracy.
Aristotle begins his treatise on citizenship with some essays on
stewardship and wealth accumulation: not because he considers those
important, but because without them you cannot have the liesure to BE a
good citizen. We do not have such people now. When I was younger, political
parties were run by women: who had liesure because married women were
"liberated" if they did not have to work. They had time to be members of
the City Beautiful Commission, or the PTA, or various civic organizations,
or to be Party officials. I could not have operated my political party when
I was County Chairman without the women who actually did the work, from
making phone calls to stuffing envelopes to driving candidates around to
punching doorbells. They WERE the party, and they had the liesure to do
those things.
No one has liesure now, because except for tenured teachers and civil
servants no one OWNS anything. The government owns your house and rents it
to you for taxes; fail to pay those and you will not have it any longer.
Your job is not yours, and you will not be allowed to own a small shop that
makes any money because WallMart and the Free Trade people and NAFTA will
come and take that away from you by bringing in goods made by slaves.
I opted out of this system long ago, but it is not an easy decision to make
for one with responsibilities and a family. I very nearly accepted a GS 13
in 1972 as an acceptable way to achieve some financial respectability. I
didn't, and became a professional gambler, and I have been fortunate.
Luck, von Moltke said, comes in the long run only to the well prepared, and
I did understand that so I was ready to take advantage of the breaks I got;
but as Mr Heinlein said, we writers are professional gamblers. It takes
talent, but it takes luck as well.
Most can't opt out, or don't know how. True, in hidsight: tuck a buck a day
away back in 1970 and put that into an index mutual fund and you would be
financially independent today. That is a lesson for our children. It is one
that some of mine have learned.
But it is a hard learned lesson for some of us brought up in an older era,
when a hard day's work for a fair day's pay, and loyalty both ways in
companies, was standard; when one could work for 40 years for a company and
know that one would have retirement and a gold watch and some respect.
That wasn't quite yeomanry, but it was close.
But the corrosive acid of "neo conservatism" which counts cheap underwear
as more important than having a local dry goods store owner who is also the
Boy Scout leader and who OWNS his shop and has some independence; which
counts the mega-complexes like ADM as far more important than a network of
independent family farmers; which preaches that companies have no
obligations to their workers, only to their stockholders, because money is
the only thing that matters, and "investment" of money is FAR more
important than an investment of time and work and devotion; this acid has
destroyed the civilization I grew up in, and it is now reaping its reward.
Property is now safe only if guarded. Strong men armed are needed to keep
what one has because most no longer believe that people have an RIGHT to
what they have earned.
And if some school teacher had had the nerve to tell one of those trench
coated children "It doesn't matter if the jocks laugh at you and hate you,
God loves you," the teacher would have been fired if not jailed. If you
say "Thou shalt not covet" in school, you will not teach long; then wonder
why the graduates of the schools covet each others goods and wives, and
have no notion of OWNERSHIP. Why should they? They OWN nothing other than
some portable goods; they don't even know what OWNERSHIP is. And they
certainly have no conception of RIGHTS, because there is no fountain of
right; there is no basis to right other than what one can protect. With
guns and hirelings.
We have sown the wind, and we sow it now. And soon no one will OWN anything.
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