Amerika

A great deal of online discourse concerns how “capitalism” is oppressing us, almost always by people who confuse economic systems with how government has inserted itself in them. Our current system is driven by benefits and taxes which turn free markets into socialist tools in a system called neoliberalism.

We are told that free markets liberate us and in comparison to socialism of any form this is true. Command economies like those in socialist states suffer from central control, but even more, from a lack of motivation. When you are subsidized for attending a job, your desire to perform above and beyond the minimum is minimal.

The problem with “freedom” and “liberty” is that they are substitutes for a goal. We want to be free from socialism, of course, but — then what? There needs to be a higher goal than simply avoiding what we do not want. We need to have something that we want as well.

All of the democratization process in the West represents a tantrum against authority which brought people greater degrees of prosperity, but in doing so, required their time and labor, so they rebelled against it. Then later they find out that with no one doing the labor, anarchic third world primitive poverty returns.

We have been cruising on what we do not want for a millennium now. We did not want kings because they made us maintain civilization. We did not want hierarchy because that made us feel bad. We did not want capitalism because some did better than others. Abolishing grades and giving participation awards instead of choosing winners of footraces will come next.

Democratization brought social mobility. If you were born a peasant and earned enough money, you could live like a king, or at least like an upper middle-class homeowner in a nice suburb. However, social mobility meant that you owed your time to society to prove your worth, and it turns out that this consumes most of your time.

The average person works for forty-four hours a week. They probably commute another forty minutes both ways on average, and have to get ready for a half-hour in the morning. Add in the other preparations, such as acquiring clothes and packing lunches or answering emails, and you have eleven hours a day five days a week spent on work.

And for what?

To keep the economy growing, yes, but mostly to resist social mobility. You are either going up, or going down. If you stand still, others will take your place. So you have to get in there and show them that you are loyal. You do this by spending lots of hours doing stuff that you could not care less about. You spend your life to prove your worth.

The dark side of social mobility is that it creates adversarial relationships — like those in elections, courtrooms, and business — between individuals in a society. The guy over there is not your neighbor in a Biblical sense, but the competition. If he rises, you might fall. So do nothing to help him and hurt him, if you can.

When you go to a doctor’s office, she is thinking in these terms: how do I prescribe something that makes me money, without getting sued, while keeping the patient from changing his unhealthy lifestyle? Push the bastard back down or he might rise above me. And take the money and run, since escaping this society through wealth is the only true reward.

The doctor is there to sell you something you cannot complain about, and to increase his own social mobility. Similarly your repair guys, lawyers, restaurants, news media, and every other business are trying to sell you something that costs them little but brings in lots of money, so they do not fall behind and get dragged beneath the wheel of progress.

Is this capitalism? Capitalism says that people exchange money for goods and services, and that whatever is abundant decreases in cost while what is rare increases in cost. It is simply Darwinism. But social mobility turns this into a nasty contest between individuals to see who escapes the prison with enough money to retire in style.

Everything government does to “improve” this process is also designed to destroy you slowly. They give you free money, but take most of your money in taxes and fees, at which point you are working just to keep your head above water. If you get rich enough, the taxes no longer matter, and so you will vote for more of them to push everyone else back down.

Modern liberalism has become the province of the already-wealthy who live off investments more than salaries. The high taxes and free stuff from government smash everyone else back into their place at the bottom of the stack. This is why liberals adore suicidal and destructive stuff like diversity, socialism, unions, and regulations.

The herd thinks capitalism oppresses it, which is fine by those liberals, since this means that the herd will vote for more free stuff, which devalues their money even more while driving the value of investments upward. The already-wealthy benefit and everyone else gets butchered. This is the high cost of social mobility.

Tags: liberalism, social darwinism, social mobility