The left would love to tell you that they care about the little guy and that it is those other people, the ones that do not believe the collectivist lie that wealth redistribution is anything but a scheme to enrich the credentialed elite leftists in charge, that is the problem, but despite the propaganda and a lame media that has willingly become the propaganda arm of the left, the truth bears witness to a different story
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is forecasting a difficult holiday season, but Tiffany & Co. just exceeded their earnings estimates by the simple expedient of raising their prices. It’s hard to find a more vivid example of the segmenting taking place in American society: The wealthy are doing very well indeed, while even bargain retailers are having a harder time of things.
I thought of this when I read Charlotte Allen’s new piece in the Weekly Standard about the divide between the vast tech wealth of Silicon Valley and the people who provide them goods and services. It’s hard to excerpt, so you’ll have to read the whole thing, but to summarize, she looks at the way even affluent communities are dividing into the super-rich and the merely extremely well-to-do … who live in what used to be starter homes for the middle class. The regular middle class, meanwhile, seems to be disappearing, squashed outward to more distant suburbs by the immense pressure of housing prices. It is becoming an area of rich and poor, with little in between.
That’s hardly specific to Silicon Valley. The District of Columbia, where I live, has the highest proportion of college graduates in America. The median value of owner-occupied housing is more than twice the national average — and yet our poverty rate is almost 30 percent higher. Manhattan, where I grew up, has similar statistics, except that the median value of owner-occupied housing is more like four or five times the national average, for far less space, light and privacy than most Americans enjoy. Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco … America’s urban centers are starting to look like barbells, incomewise, with a lot of weight at each end and not much in the middle.
Of course, terrible urban policy is partly to blame. All of these places restrict building pretty sharply, which keeps the housing supply well below demand. That is not the only factor at play. Allen wisely points to the difference between the tech boom that built postwar California and the one it is having now: The old boom created lots and lots of middle-class jobs, from design to manufacturing to selling the stuff. The new companies employ a lot of high-end-knowledge workers, but not so many middle managers and secretaries. And they don’t have much of a supply chain; the jobs Google Inc.’s success creates are mostly going to be at Google.
In other words, the middle class isn’t just being pushed outward by bad housing policy, but it’s also being compacted. That’s not always bad news for the individuals involved: Some people are falling down the ladder, but others are leaping upward, making more money than they would have in the past.
This phenomenon is not an accident. It’s part and parcel of what happens when collectivists take control. The collectivists, socialist, or progressives, nothing but marxists pretending to be more enlightened, would love to keep pretending they are about social justice and equality, but that’s nothing but cover for the credentialed elite that take advantage of the rubes that believe this drivel to do their power and wealth redistribution. All these collectivist cults, after all, are about nothing but replacing the current masters with another group of masters. One with even more power and the ability to abrogate even more of the wealth to themselves.
The funny thing is that oft times even the rubes see this phenomenon as it manifests in the ashes of the old USSR, but can’t see that it is part and parcel of the collectivist agenda. What I find a sign of mental deficiency is their attempt to pretend that the communist age was fairer because the powerful had less of the wealth directly tied to themselves, while ignoring that pretending it belonged to the state but having exclusive access to it was more of the same. This story is playing itself out, yet again, in still pretending to be communist China. At least the Chinese no longer pretend that communism wasn’t about new masters and their ability to collect the power and wealth, and not about all that social justice and equality of all nonsense that makes your average OWS hippy retard get an orgasm.
So back to Barack Obama’s new America. How is that Hope & Change working out for you, huh? My sole consolation is that I am hearing that so many now understand that the promise of free healthcare is a ruse to get more control over us serfs. Collectivism results in a two tier system. Those at the top hold all the power and wealth, and the rest will wallow in shared misery. That’s by design, because the easiest thing to give rubes is shared misery. You can’t raise everyone up, but you sure can drag everyone down to the same level. Every collectivist experiment has done that. Some real fast, others at a slower pace. But that’s what it always ends up like. And we are seeing that manifested in the changes Obama has brought to America. Thanks for nothing unicorn fart sniffers.