Get a Job
Herman Cain, a tea-party favorite, and the CEO & Founder of Godfather’s Pizza, was asked about the Occupy Wallstreet street theater/protests. He said, in part:
“Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself. It is not someone’s fault if they succeeded, it is someone’s fault if they failed,”
Normally, I would not find the comment noteworthy. It is hardly controversial. Americans do not regard failure as a passkey to the moral high-ground from which the losers self righteously condemn the successful for the sin of success.
But more than one Catholic commentator whose brilliance I admire have excoriated the statement, and Cain, and conservatives for admiring it. One of them said conservatives were handing the election to Obama; the other likened Capitalism to allowing the rich to shoot the poor in the head.
Now, I would opine that it is Socialist propaganda to depict socialism as helping the poor shoot their hated enemy, the rich, and doubly propaganda to depict capitalism as helping the rich shoot the poor. It is the rhetorical trick of moral equivalence.
In reality, the two are not equivalent. Socialist theory, based on pseudo-Darwinism and Hegelianism, says that man by nature exists in the ruthless war of eternal mutual exploitation and victimization. Those most successful at defrauding and mulcting their victims become the rich, and form the laws and customs and ideology to justify their hideous cannibalism; it proposes that the cure for this original sin is to eat the rich and place all wages and prices and labor contracts and eventually human behavior whatsoever under totalitarian control, which will somehow be benevolent as if administered by unfallen angels. It is a theory of mutual extermination combined with apocalyptic Utopianism.
Socialism is incompatible with Christianity, and with Western civilization, at every point. Only by the most agile of mental contortions can the two be reconciled within one mind.
Capitalism (so called–the name itself is a socialist agitprop bit of Newspeak, meant to imply that liberty only benefits the investors) says that man deserves the fruits of his own labor, and that all men are equal innately, so that if one man trades his labor to another in return for a wage, provided no fraud and no threat of violence influences the decision, it is not right to interfere in that decision, either out of greed nor pity nor any motive. The wealth of nations, so the theory goes, is built on the labor of all men in such free trades. Libertarians propose that the free market should be unbridled, conservatives propose the free market give way when the interests of public defense or the common weal contradict, but otherwise be given its head. It is a theory of mutual cooperation, combined with pragmatic and cynical insight into the nature of fallen man.
Capitalism is compatible with Christianity, or nearly so, but only if it is not made itself into an idol, and only if the very grave dangers to the soul that commercialism and materialism pose are recognized and checked, and provision is made to protect and support the poor, the widow and the orphan, all of whom are particularly vulnerable to fraud and exploitation under the free market system.
In sum, socialism harms the poor and the rich alike, but robbing the rich of their money and lives, and robbing the poor of their jobs and liberties. Capitalism is the situation where rich and poor mutually benefit each other on such terms as they mutually agree.
The idea that capitalism is rich eating the poor and socialism is poor eating the rich is a socialist idea at its roots, the idea that the world is dog-eat-dog. Socialism is dog-eat-dog, warfare between classes and races and nations of men, all of whom claim each others’ resources and property and work and lives as their own. Capitalism is peace, each man under his own vine and in the shade of his own fig tree, with his boundary stone respected as sacred.
Socialism is the gun in both hands. Capitalism is the moneybag in both hands.
Neither of the Catholic commentators I admire, when commenting on Herman Cain’s remark said, “Mr Cain’s advice would be good in a free market, where jobs were available, but in the current depression created by Democrat-led interference in the housing market, and in the credit market, and the Republican-led madness of Keynesian bailouts and currency inflation, have abolished the free market in all but name. No one can go get a job if the state has destroyed the job market.” — whether true or false, fair or unfair, such a criticism would have at least been related to reality.
As best I can tell, this comment by Cain was greeted on the Conservative side of American politics with cheers. Americans love a blunt truth.
Why cheers? The American spirit has always been optimistic and entrepreneurial.We usually do not have the free time to drive to New York and being provoking police men, or the extra money to hired Mexicans to stand with us and wave placards.
Middle-class Americans also tend to be tidy. The Mall, for example, was cleaner after the Glen Beck 9-12 rally than it was before, because all the Tea Party types picked up after themselves and others. So Middle-class Americans tend to view (or smell) unwashed activists and agitators urinating in the streets and crapping in corners with something akin to physical revulsion.
Our first impulse, as so adroitly voiced by Cain, is to wonder why these people, none of whom is in a wheelchair, are not out looking to labor to do? Why aren’t they doing something usful? We have a Ben Franklinesque mistrust of idle hands.
So we tend automatically to side with the honest working man, whether he be rich or poor, against the self-anointed white Middle Class faculty lounge radical, who does not work, but is rich — rich enough to take a New York vacation — and claims to speak for the poor, and speaks either nonsense, or Marxist nonsense, or lies.
Englishmen and Europeans of the Continent should have a different automatic tendency. To them, every gathered mob is Wat Tyler, and the rich man is Ebeneezer Scrooge. Nor do I say that the anger of such protests in Europe are not not without some color of justice: the choices there have been restricted, historically speaking, to crony-capitalism and squirarchy, oligarchy, monarchy, national socialism, socialism, fascism, and another type of oligarchy. The poor man there cannot go out and get a job and get rich: both law and custom, either under monarchic or socialistic schemes, have deterred it. If we started listed self-made men in American, starting with George Washington and ending with Steve Jobs, and compared it to the list of self-made Englishmen, which list would run out of candidates first?
Now, while my Catholic friends are rightly annoyed at the rich who grind the faces of the poor, and rightly wary of the many scriptural injunctions against the deceit of riches and the inability of the rich to find salvation, please note that this nothing to do with what Mr Cain said.
He said don’t blame others. Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the banks.
Is there anything unchristian in that? To me, it sounds like a rephrase of the Tenth Commandment against covetousness.
We are not Europeans, and we are not Englishmen. Our wealthy class is not a class; we did not get rich by despoiling monasteries during the reformation. We have no upstart wealth in America because it is all upstart wealth: “Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations” is a typical American proverb (all the more typically American because it was imported from Lancaster). The Italians say it more beautifully: “dalle stalle alle stelle alle stalle” (“from stalls to stars to stalls”). It means that the son of the workingman might be a millionaire, and the son of a millionaire might be a workingman.
The Englishman has a perfect right to be envious of a wealthy family who, protected by unequal laws, built a fortune by enclosing common greens, under a legal regime that forbids the free alienation of land, or who conquered Ireland and exploited Irish tenants. In that case, the wealth was gained by violence and fraud, and maintained by unjust and partial laws. But what laws are at fault here?
The housing collapse was caused by the Federal government pressuring banks to make bad loans to persons known to be unable to repay. It created an artificial and delusive housing bubble, a speculator’s bubble, similar to the easy credit policies that created the first Great Depression. But who one Wall Street has the power to make laws?
Class warfare has always had very little success as a Red propaganda tactic here in America, because, traditionally, we have no classes. As the saying says, the wealth of your father is no guarantee of your success.
The free market is nothing more and nothing less than the combined and consensus decisions of all the laboring people in the economy, and by its joint action it sets the prices on goods and services, the rent on the land, and interest on moneylending, and even the work conditions and hours. It votes every day with every dollar spent or withheld. While there may be some consumer loyalty or nostalgia for once-good products, such nostalgia is a luxury whose price cannot reliably be kept above the natural price of goods and services. So the free market is no respecter of persons. If your father was talented and you are not, what is that to your customers? For good or ill, they are your ultimate employers.
The American Dream runs this way: If you want the rich man’s house, you work the 20-hour work days he worked, and bring the same genius to the task, and please the fickle public with the good or service you have brought to them, and maybe, with a little luck and a lot of sweat, you or your children might have that house. The idea of setting the proletarian against the elite will not work in a nation with no idle proles and no privileged elite.
Over the last fifty or sixty years, however, the welfare state and “crony capitalism” has indeed created an ersatz proletarian in America. The reason why any mention of race in this nation is explosive is because the effort to tie proletarian status to poor urban Blacks has been, by and large, successful. Now as never before class warfare themes seem to have some traction.
The American Dream is mocked and hated and derided by the Left, whose world view is retarded at the stage of Victorian critiques of English and Continental class privilege, and in Nineteenth Century economic models which thought that value comes from labor, not from the subjective valuation of the customer as measured by what he is willing to trade for it.
I regret to report that the American Dream is, by and large, dead. We sold our nation to Red China in order to run up the national credit card, mortgaging our children’s future, and grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren, to buy shiny stuff to give to voters in return for votes. You will never own that large house.
If that was what the protesters on Wall Street were protesting, I would go join them. But that is what the Tea Party is protesting. This is the opposite faction. They don’t want the return of the American Dream of hard work and more hard work in return for an opportunity to make something of yourself. The Occupy Wall Street crowd do not hearken back to such colonial icons as the Boston Tea Party which protested taxes. These zombies are protesting for higher taxes and the abolition of colonial ideals. They hearken to the military and paramilitary rhetoric of the Marxist-Leninist: they are an occupying force, an army rather than a party.
We see the unsightly spectacle of idle youth, children of privilege and middle-class wealth, flocking to Wall Street to pay nostalgic homage to the pinko riots of the 1960’s, and demanding … what, again, exactly? Money? Opportunity? A reduction of the laws interfering in the economy? An end to the free market? A utopia where kleptocrats and despots rob the few and distribute to their cronies and supporters?
Again, if the protesters were protesting bank fraud, they would have my full support. During the housing market collapse, there were many people on whom the bank foreclosed with no color of legal right; in some cases, submitting fraudulent paperwork, or lying under oath to the court. I vote for public horsewhipping and public hangings in those cases–I have no sympathy for rich men whom commit petty crimes against the humble and trusting souls who cannot defend themselves. Let the goddess Justice, blind alike to faction and station, employ her terrible sword to smite them. But is that what this protest is about?
This is a Saul Alinsky riot. First you gather the angry mob. Then you decide what they are angry about.
The conservative commentators at PJTV give even shorter shrift to the protesters: Get a Job, you Worthless HDB’s. http://bit.ly/q2IWvn
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
