I think Nangleator's comment here is accurate: The rich want most of us to just die off.
Have you ever lived in (or been inside of) a house from the late Victorian/Edwardian era? I don't mean a mansion, but a house that might of been the home of a professional such as a physician, businessman, lawyer, engineer or accountant. If you have, then the house probably had two sets of staircases. There was a wide staircase that went from the second floor bedrooms to the ground floor living area: Library, music room, living room and dining room. From the living or dining room, there was a staircase that went to a finished room in the basement, where there was likely a billiard table and lounging area for the gentlemen.
On the other side of a wall from the main staircase was a narrower staircase. It went from the attic/third floor, where there were bedrooms for the staff, to the second floor, where there was a sewing room, to the kitchen and pantry on the first floor, and then into the unfinished part of the basement, where there was the laundry room (with its well hand pump) and the boiler room with its furnace and coal bin. Both areas of the house had separate entrances.
Think about that for a few minutes. Those houses were built to house a family with several children (three or four bedrooms on the second floor) and they had live-in space for servants: At least a maid, a cook, a laundress, and a chauffeur or groom. Keep in mind that those houses were the homes of professionals, not the wealthy. The wealthy lived far better.
Also keep in mind that the population of the United States back then was less than a third of what it is today and the global population was nearly a fourth of what it is today.
The rich lived very well, indeed, back as the 19th Century drew to a close and before the Great War broke out.
To put it bluntly, the rich do not need most of us. They have the same attitude as the President of Tajikistan: They'd rather have a large piece of a small pie, so nobody else gets any, than have a larger-sized, yet proportionately smaller piece of a much larger pie. They would be more than happy to see most of the middle class pushed down into poverty. They would be pleased as punch to go back to an era where only those with money could have decent medical care and those who didn't just got on with the business of dying fast. For a lot of them would still be rich, only now, there would be plenty of people looking for jobs as cooks, maids, butlers, chauffeurs and the like. Oh, there would be some doctors, lawyers, dentists and so on, but they would exist only to serve the rich, the storekeepers and each other.
Keep that in mind when you read how Republicans want to gut Medicare and eliminate both Social Security and unemployment insurance. Republicans want to push this country back, not forward. They don't see the need for better infrastructure, as that benefits the people more than the rich. They don't seen the need to support education, at least beyond the sixth grade, for the same reason. The rich will still be able to send their offspring to Andover, Choate, Yale and Harvard. They'll be more than happy to gut and then eventually close the state schools and the "land grant" universities.
The rich will be happy if most of the rest of us die off. There will be enough of us left to fill the roles of servants, tradesmen and farmers. There will be enough of us to fill the ranks of the army of the Empire. When the rich need us to go to war, they'll beat the drums of patriotism and away the lower classes will go, while the sons of the rich remain home to manage their businesses and estates.
Then one has to wonder about the mentality of the Teabaggers, for most of them are working to cut their own throats, economically-speaking, in the service of the rich.
I think that the explanation from "Mississippi Burning" is the reason: They'll be happy to live in poverty as long as they have someone else to look down on. They see their lives crumbling, the factories shuttered, the good jobs gone, and they don't see the fingerprints of the rich people who run the GOP on those events. They're more than happy to believe the crap shoveled out by people like Willard "Mitt" Romney, a man who made a fortune from the export of American jobs, that everything will be better if we only remove any impediments to the rich amassing an even larger share of the wealth.
But do you want to know what the final irony will be for the Teabaggers? It is this: Most of them will lose their guns. Firearm ownership will revert to the rich, for the last thing they want is to have a heavily armed underclass.
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7 comments:
Joke will be on the rich, when they find out it takes a LOT of well-educated people to maintain a modern civilization, never mind advance it.
Cut the population down by 90% and you'd drop back to 18th century tech. Most of them wouldn't mind... except that medicine would drop almost as far.
Oh, they won't care. They'll have the money to travel to a nation that did care about education and science and that has a top-flight medical system.
Sort of the way the Saudi princes now come here.
Misfit is right. The elites of banana republics don't care that their own universities don't produce enough well-educated people to maintain a modern society. If they need modern medical care they simply hop a jet to France (they used to come to the US, but now that's too much hassle, thanks to the Department of Fatherland Security). If they need someone to install a new computerized security system, they simply pay to fly someone in from Britain. And so forth.
In exchange, they get fine hand-crafted furnishings from their peons, as well as their every need catered to. From their perspective, they get to have their cake -- the benefits of modern society -- and eat it too -- the benefits (to them) of early industrial society.
I do disagree with Misfit on one thing. The master class doesn't care if the peons have guns. That is because they know that they can simply hire the worst of the worst, the most thuggish of the peons, as their own enforcer class. And it seems to be working. The majority of even gun-owning Americans llanches when they come up against today's modern well-armed paramilitary police forces... see, the secret is, when you have two people with guns, and one is a ruthless thug and one is a decent human being, the decent human being *always* loses that gunfight. Because he flinches before pulling the trigger to take someone's life. While the ruthless thug never does.
- Badtux the Apocalyptic Penguin
They only want to trim not drastically reduce. That assures the dwindling resources are extended a generation or so. those resources are wasted on the middle class and they can better use it.
As to the whole gun thing.. The picture is bigger. things like ammo gets scarcer, metals wear. The remaining arms are less usable at a distance so successful sniping is less likely though tried. even with success the fewer uber rich means the rich get richer. The only way the rich get richer is by commerce with others. See self extinction.
Its a war of technology and those that have it will hold the high ground till they find the tech they depend on dependent in the hands of the few that really can fix and use it. Even with 18th century tech the people that could control it with money were not the people that made it actually go. That was part of the reversal as those that could make it go needed fewer resources to use it.
I'm Nangleator with on this. Only the time line is mushier. View the events as more plastic. Between the scarcity of resources especially fossil fuels and the need to skilled people to keep things going or build even more specialized tools or environments there will be a population shrink before the problem reverses. And like the 19th century a new class will emerge as a technocracy. Those with with power and money will be dwindling as without a consumer base they will diminish themselves. After all those 18th century rich did extinctify themselves by their own hand.
When USA goes down the rest of the world follows as they need the outside markets and theirs is already poor.
So no, I don't see the whole picture the same. I see a swing but before we go over the top, like a swing we go back the other way. Right now the wackos are moving to the crest of the wave, the trough is unseen and very unforgiving. And the wackos are riding a very unseaworthy boat.
Eck!
Eck!, you appear to believe that wealth is money. No. Wealth is *STUFF* -- a large house lovingly hand-crafted by serf craftsmen, fine hand-built cabinetry and furnishing, and, most importantly, *land*, without which nothing else is possible. In third world countries the elites basically sell nothing to each other, and sell either agricultural items or fine hand-made objects to people overseas in order to obtain what little money is needed to buy those technological and industrial goods that their serfs cannot lovingly hand-craft. They control their serfs via their control of land -- their societies are not ownership societies, their societies are rent societies, where rent is often paid in goods and services directly rather than using the intermediary of money.
This is where notions like "the people of nation X live on less than $2 per day" comes from, where, when you go to nation X, you notice that the majority of people appear healthy, reasonably clothed, and reasonably well-fed, which simply is impossible on $2 per day in a capitalist economy. But -- they don't live in a capitalist economy. That $2 per day number is misleading, because it completely overlooks the fact that most of nation X is on a barter economy, not a money economy. Like capitalist economists, you are conditioned to look only at economic output denominated in money because, well, you live in an economy where virtually every economic transaction is money-denominated. But that is not true of most 3rd world nations. Money there is something they use for importing items that cannot be lovingly hand-crafted by serfs, it is their control of land and housing that is their wealth, not money.
Hmm, control of land and housing, what is the outcome of the "housing crisis" going to be? Does that explain why the banks (the oligarchs) were bailed out, not the homeowners? Because the whole *point* is to transfer all that land and housing to the oligarchs? Paranoid penguins are.... paranoid. But is it paranoia if they're *really* out to get ya?
- Badtux the Paranoid Penguin
"...their societies are rent societies, where rent is often paid in goods and services directly rather than using the intermediary of money."
And we're getting very, very close to slavery, again. Sure, the word isn't there, and you can change masters at will. But if you want to live, you get up early and work hard all day for a rich man.
Indeed. The Party of the Confederacy perfected it when slavery was outlawed in the South -- it was the sharecropping system, and it existed from the 1870's until WW2 destroyed it by sucking too much of the enslaved workforce into the cities where they could earn money wages making tanks and bombs. They've been pining to get it back ever since.
- Badtux the almost-slave Penguin
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