A recent, urgent-seeming article popped up in the Wall Street Journal just a couple of days ago , asking if the middle American class is even necessary to the wealthy. The wealthy now have the money to have their needs met by companies that don't need anyone else to survive. In other words, we're toast. Labor organizing, financial regulators, governmental oversight is all going to fail: the wealthy are, in the end, going to do what they want, because there are enough of them to sustain the economy without paying anyone above minimum wage. (Which I am sure they will soon abolish.)
Here's the hopeful side I'll take out of it. It beats all the negatives that weigh heavy against it. At some point, we are going to get screwed out of jobs by the wealthy. We then come up with a barter system that eventually grows into an economy. We begin picking up fundamental skills and learn to live in a world detached from the producers and industrialists. We'll all be a nation of small shops, local economies, barter systems, and whatever scrapping we need to do to get the actual "dollars" we need for manufactured goods. We'll become a nation like BarterTown, while the wealthy--and the politicians they own--do as they please.
Worked for Louis XVI.
2 comments:
Maybe if I had a better brain for economics, I'd understand how an entire economy could be sustained by a shrinking number of wealthy people.
BTW, you might like this: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/how-to-lose-readers-without-even-trying/. I have things to say about what kind of society the wealthiest people want to live in, but he says it better than me.
An interesting concept, but I think your premise is too pessimistic. Even if most companies are not at all altruistic and only care about the bottom line, most of them can't sustain themselves by only catering to the wealthy. They need the lower classes to buy their products.
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