the bargain
Hello, friends! Rob here.
This will probably be my last blog for a little while. It's been fun keeping up the weekly schedule, but I think it's time for me to take a step back and stop thinking about stuff so much. You'll probably agree after reading this, because oh man, I went for it on this one.
Monday: Here's something I'm not just thinking about today. I've been thinking about it a lot lately. It's one of those "big" thoughts- the kind that usually don't stick around much longer than a joint being passed back and forth between a bunch of second-year philosophy majors. I've been calling it "the Great Bargain," and I think it is the fundamental premise of any human society. It doesn't matter if you're looking at a mostly free-trade economy like the United States, a socialist state, a feudal monarchy, or an isolated agrarian commune- at the heart of any society, you can find this simple proposition, and any society may be evaluated by how well it holds up its end of the Bargain. What is it?
Do your part, and we'll take care of you.
Tuesday: Think about the things you need. I don't mean "need" in a figurative, industrial-strength hair dryer sense- I'm talking about the kind of very broad, basic stuff without which we are incapable of survival. Fundamental human needs. It's a deceptively hard question, because it represents a unique intersection of physiology and philosophy. There are no wrong answers here, but I'd like to play Family Feud and try to guess some of the most common responses:
-air
-water
-food
-shelter
-medicine
-family/human connection
-fulfillment
-security
-hope
Obviously, your list may not be identical to mine. I put what I thought were more obvious and immediate needs at the top, and the more abstract stuff at the bottom. I was trying to cast a wide net and anticipate other people's responses rather than provide my own. I debated including certain items like "freedom" and "religion," but felt that those were a bit more debatable and could fall under the umbrella of "fulfillment." My list is imperfect. If you made one, yours is too. But I bet we're in the same ballpark. And I bet we both left out a big one:
You need a job. Right?
I mean, do you? We talk about jobs as though they're necessary- "people need jobs," get this country back to work," "I will be the greatest jobs President God ever created," etc. But the majority of modern employment is not intrinsically nourishing in any sense of the word. People in contemporary societies rarely reap the benefits of their own work. A grocery cashier doesn't eat everything they ring up. An assembly line worker doesn't take home everything they build. Lawyers don't typically represent themselves in court. Even drug dealers (the smart ones, anyway) know better than to get high on their own supply.
Wednesday: That's how the Bargain works. On its face, the notion of being "taken care of" by society may reek of socialism to a certain subset of rugged individualists, but it's still exactly how a modern free-market economy should function. Unless you are a carpenter or a farmer, your work doesn't literally put a roof over your head or food in your belly- rather, you get money for doing that work, and then you trade that money for the things you actually need, like shoes and meat and dialysis. All of these vital goods and services are provided by other people. Even those farmers work their land using tools they didn't manufacture and transport their crops over tax-funded roads. Corporations may be people, but people are not corporations, which means it is impossible for a person to be 100% vertically integrated without going straight-up Walden on society's ass. Rather, we all contribute to the big picture in some small way, and we all benefit from and rely upon one another's contributions in turn. This architecture provides people with the means of fulfilling their basic needs and wants, or at least makes it easier and less time-consuming to do so.
Everyone does their part. Everyone is taken care of. If you still want to blanch at that, then think of it as "you don't work, you don't eat." I think that's something we should all be able to agree on- anyone who puts in an honest day's work deserves to go to bed with a full stomach. That's the Bargain. A society that fails to do that for a significant portion of its people is not sustainable.
Thursday: When Donald Trump and any of his increasingly dubious mouthpieces talk about "winning," they're talking about the economy. Unless he's referring to our incarceration rate (number one in the world, baby! WOOOOO!) or his campaign's preposterous, Orwellian claim to have "ended" the pandemic, the economy is really the only concrete accomplishment he has to hang his hat on.
And it really did seem to be going well before the virus hit. Granted, a President saying "things were going great until I had to manage a crisis" is kind of like a head coach saying "well, we were winning until the other team took the lead," but still. Before the virus hit, the economy looked like it was in good shape: jobs were up, the stock market was booming, and all sort of graphs seemed to be indicating positive growth.
There's just one small problem: That growth doesn't really translate to many quality-of-life improvements for, um, people? Like, the stock market is cool and all, but what good is a record-high Dow-Jones when literally half the country isn't even invested in the market? How can we pat ourselves on the back for boosting employment when most of those new jobs fail to provide economic stability or upward mobility? Why do we venerate and appease "job creators" when the jobs they create don't compensate the people working them with a living wage? How can we call our economy "good" (much less a meritocracy) when a hard-working person can fail to death at it just by getting sick?
Society is supposed to be a safety net, but we've been slashing those for decades. To be clear, as tempting as it may be to pin all the world's ills on the President (I've done it before), this is not uniquely a Trump problem. He accelerated and exacerbated it, but I don't think there has been a President in my lifetime (including the handful of Reagan years for which I was largely unconscious) who hasn't had a hand in widening the gulf between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else. And even though I think he's the best choice we have at this exact moment, Biden has absolutely played a role in this as well.
You've all heard about how this crisis has actually made the richest handful of Americans even richer. I know people who are happy- not just, like, "well, I guess that's how it is," but genuinely happy- that Jeff Bezos has made enough money to purchase a fleet of space yachts over the course of this slow-motion disaster year that has left millions of people facing eviction, starvation, and unemployment. Apparently, taxing the wealthiest one percent would "punish" them for working hard. This utter crock of shit is perhaps the greatest con job in all of human history, for the following reasons:
1) Progressive taxation doesn't remove the incentive to make money. To use an extreme example, a person making $500,000 dollars a year and paying back fifty percent of that in taxes (which- I CANNOT stress this enough- isn't even how tax brackets work) is still going to be much better off than a person earning $50,000 a year and paying zero taxes.
2) It implies that the only people who work hard are the ultra-wealthy. Why do we only seem to care about about punishing the hard work of the absolute richest people on the planet? I know a lot of teachers who work their asses off, and apparently it's fine and normal that we make them buy essential classroom supplies out of pocket. Every day, we punish teachers, and janitors, and the dudes laying down fresh blacktop in the middle of August for working hard, and there never seems to be much uproar about that.
It isn't necessarily Bezos' responsibility to end world hunger (even if it would be the Christian thing to do). But isn't it all of our responsibility to create a society that takes care of its people? One that ensures, to the best of its ability, a positive outcome for as many participants as it can? Isn't that kind of the whole point of all this stuff? Systems, societies, economies- these things should exist to make our lives better. That's not what we have. We have an economy that hates us. We have an economy that does nothing to serve us. We would throw our own grandparents into a furnace just to keep the economic engine running- and that's barely even a metaphor at this point - but the only thing that furnace does is keep Charles Koch's toes from getting cold when he gets up in the middle of the night to take a piss.
We're nearing the end of an election cycle that has lasted approximately seven hundred years, and many voters are looking at the whole thing through a simple lens: "who is going to be better for the economy?" I think it's much more important to ask whose economy is going to be better for people. To help more people, and people in greater need, is the essence of the Great Bargain. Is it more helpful to raise the minimum wage, or to slash taxes for corporations and top earners? Is it better for the average person to make sure everyone has a viable path to health care that doesn't involve bankruptcy or fucking GoFundMe, or to, uhh, slash taxes for corporations and top earners? Will we do more to stimulate the economy by investing in public education and generating increased opportunity, or by slashing taxes for- you get the idea. These aren't rhetorical questions. They have answers, and we have the opportunity- the obligation- to get them right.
As a final note, I know it might seem a little "how do you do, fellow kids?" for someone like me, who- COVID notwithstanding- makes a decent living playing a saxophone, of all things, to complain about a system that has, frankly, treated me quite well. By leveling criticism at certain popular ideas and long-standing institutions from a position of relative comfort, I open myself up to the same kind of responses professional athletes sometimes get when they speak out against injustice: "lol how can u wine about America when u get paid $$MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to play a game idiot," and so on.
Well, here's the thing with that: Other people exist, and call me crazy but lately I've been thinking that more of them should be able to enjoy the same quality of life that I do, even if that means I might have to give a little bit back in some distant, hypothetical future where I've got yacht money. This is neither revolutionary thinking, nor is it particularly complicated. It is entry-level giving a shit about other people, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Friday: Here's a jam! I try to read Anastasia Basil's "Ketchup Sandwiches and Other Things Stupid Poor People Eat" at least once a year to remember my own privilege and to remind myself of a stratum of economic desperation that is often hidden from our view. Here it is, and today feels like a good day to read it and pass it around:
Ketchup Sandwiches and Other Things Stupid Poor People Eat
EPILOGUE - Next Tuesday: Just a friendly reminder that, in 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency through an election where he garnered almost three million fewer votes than his principal opponent, and he still spent months after that election making utterly baseless claims that it had been rigged against him. He's been cultivating this crop of lies- sowing it, watering it, and fertilizing it with his own bullshit- since before he even won in 2016. He is the embodiment of the privileged man's victim complex- the kind of man who says he was persecuted by a speed bump because he has never had to climb a hill. He will claim the system is rigged against him, but he is the system. He is the swamp. He always has been. He is the beneficiary of a vast architecture of hoarded advantages, and it should be clear to anyone paying attention that he has never spent a moment of his life even examining those advantages, much less working to balance them out for the benefit of others. It is not the least bit out of character for him to benefit substantially from our obsolete electoral system- a broken, undemocratic system that was designed hundreds of years ago for the explicit purpose of disenfranchising the masses, and a system that handed him the the 2016 election on a silver platter to match all of his spoons- and then stand on the podium, victorious, and promptly declare the whole thing was rigged against him. So I'm not going to say "if he does it again." He will. He'll do it if he loses. He'll do it if he wins. It'll be bullshit either way. Vote.
