Friday, March 17, 2006

You can never have too many poor people

The Missouri state legislature says you can never have too many poor people. They say this because a surplus of po' folk keeps wages down and reduces demands on Management for better benefits, by keeping the workers fighting amongst themselves for the few available jobs. This legislation is religiosity, not religion or morality. Actually, it's worse than that, it's brazen pandering: these legislators have been bought by industry, to ensure a supply of cheap labor.

And all the while, another wing of the Republican party is encouraging immigration -ostensibly because Americans won't clean up after ourselves (Mexicans are hired to do work we Americans believe is below us), but really for the same reasons as Missouri had for their legislation: a surplus of labor leads to lower wages, which inevitably leads to higher profits and thus higher dividends for the privileged few (so long as the con-game lasts). Something tells me the right hand doesn't know what the -erm- other right hand is doing.

The con. Ah yes, we've come to that. Not a conspiracy, no: a con-game. A confidence game, in which the Player (so called because he is playing us like a cheap drum) wins the confidence of the Rube, then talks Rube into doing something not-in-Rube's-own-best-interest. Player, in our case, is the established class of Industrial Capitalists.

They won our present-day and continuing confidence simply by being on top when we got on the scene. They were simply already King of the Hill, because their parents had been Players before them, and their parents before them, etc. Yes, the occasional Horatio Alger has salmon-squiggled his way up the socio-economic ladder, but he's the exception. The rule is Nepotism- that Money Speaks for Money: we all, always, help and promote those closest to us.

Over the course of centuries, they convinced us rubes that we need them: to lead us, to direct our industry, and most importantly, to determine our worth as workers. "Ownership" itself is the con: the notion that Money has any inherent value, that by itself it is worth something, that it can multiply of its own accord as if by magic (the magic of interest), that it can confer ownership of a time-space event, that it can represent any time-space event and thereby confer control.

No life-form is ever stronger than its respiro-circulatory system. By the same token, no country is ever stronger than its economy. Money is the life-blood of nations; it must circulate to all extremes, or those extremes will atrophy. Just as you would not fare very well if your brain tried to hoard your blood supply, doling it out on the basis of the "value" of work performed, so your country -and your species-- will falter as the Industrial Capitalist class hoards ever more of the money supply. Making more simply won't do, any more than making more blood: you'll just increase the pressure.