Milton The Monster

Fareed Zakaria, in his book Age Of Revolutions, recounts the following story about Milton Friedman:

“Milton Friedman told about a visit he made to an Asian country in the 1960s.  He toured a site where a canal was being constructed, and he was puzzled to see the workers using shovels rather than mechanized tractors and excavators.  He queried a government official, who answered, ‘You don’t understand.  This is a jobs program.’  Friedman said, ‘Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal.  If it’s jobs you want, then you should give those workers spoons, not shovels.’”

I sure hope Milton is enjoying being spit-roasted between Asmodeus and Mammon in the hottest bowels of Hell.  If you ever want a perfect distillation of the psychopathy that is capitalism, look no further that Milton’s smug, self-congratulatory attitude.

Let’s start by asking a few basic questions.

Why is the canal being dug?

For the benefit of human beings.  This particular project may not benefit humanity as a whole, but clearly there was some reason to expend the effort into moving a lot of dirt to enable water to flow in a direction humans wanted it to flow in.

Maybe it was for flood control reasons, maybe it was for irrigation, maybe it was to making shipping goods easier, maybe some combination thereof.  The specifics don’t matter, the underlying principle is that the task was to do something that would benefit human beings.

Can the canal benefit humans in only one way?

Presumably no.  While the canal may have a primary purpose (lets say shipping goods) it may also provide water for crops (irrigation), and / or a convenient area for fishing (food and recreation).

And just as the finished project may offer a number of benefits, so the construction itself offers multiple benefits.

In this particular case, employment to locals who apparently need the work.

The government clearly weighed the balance of speed / efficiency against the negative effects of depriving local labor with work that would provide them with money to care for themselves.

We can imagine urgent conditions where getting a canal dug as fast as possible would preclude using manual labor, but that’s a case of the negative impact of not having a canal vastly outweighs the positive of employing the local labor pool.

Friedman demonstrates a complete inability to comprehend basic human needs, focusing instead entirely on the abstract bottom line of cutting costs.

He’s incapable of recognizing the cost of excluding local labor from the project, that not only will it affect the income of those laborers but will also stir up resentment, not to mention other problems associated with a lack of income. 

Taking a little longer and paying a little extra might indeed be a bargain in the long run if it prevents more problems from arising.

Friedman can’t see that.

All Friedman can see is a budget that can be slashed to satisfy the demands of profit.

Profits not shared with those doing the work, just the owners at the top.

He is utterly incapable of recognizing gainful employment for a large number of people is part of that profit.

No, Friedman is one selfish psychopath.  Fnck you and your desire to care for yourself and your family, all that matters is that I make more money. 

Like all uber-wealthy and their lickspittle apologists, he stands atop a mountain of labor provided directly and indirectly by millions of people.  Between the summit and the base, however, is a cloud layer that prevents them from seeing the mountain that supports them.  All they see is their own pinnacle and bright, open skies above them and they assume that anybody not sharing their pinnacle is unworthy.

If the mountain below the cloud level should crumble away, the pinnacle would tumble into the abyss.

Here’s a suggestion:

Once you get past tens of millions of dollars, you enter a realm where wealth becomes unreal.  How significantly different is the lifestyle of a multi-millionaire from a lowly single digit billionaire, the single digit billionaire from the super-wealthy 1%?

How much more do they have than the people who only possess a hundred million in wealth?

Tax the fnck out of those people, but let them have bragging rights.

Let them add as many zeroes to their bank accounts as they wish.

It’s all imaginary, anyway.  Wealth and its sister, power, is only what people say it is.

How many collectors do we know of who bragged about their extensive / expensive collections only when they died nobody else wanted that crap and it either sold for pennies on the dollar or got trashed?

That’s true of all wealth and power.

Things have value only because human beings agree to that value.

The French nobility had power only so long, then one day the French people decided they no longer had any power and heads rolled.

Now -- while we all share a ballpark agreement on what constitutes wealth and power -- is the time to shore up the system, adjust it so it no longer races headlong towards a precipice.

Take the wealth horded by a few and instead of concentrating it into an increasingly smaller circle of greedy fists, spread it out so everyone benefits from it.

That’s not even sharing the wealth, it’s just circulating the wealth.

The uber-rich will see all that money flow back into their pockets through their various holdings because the bulk of humanity will use that wealth to improve their lives by buying goods and services.

The uber-wealthy will not suffer as a result.

Their lives will remain unchanged.

But the flow of wealth will benefit countless others who suffer lack today through no fault of their own.

Dig the canal.

© Buzz Dixon