Daniel Greenfield article: The Working Class and the Government Class
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Posted: 01 Dec 2012 08:12 PM PST
Forget
all the talk about whether we will or won't go over the fiscal cliff.
We ourselves are the fiscal cliff and have been for some time now. The
real fiscal cliff is not the point at which we run out of money, our
credit rating sinks lower than Enron and or everyone is fighting over
jars of cat food at Wal-Mart. The real fiscal cliff is when even the
dumbest person in the country is no longer able to deny what the packs
of robbers and thieves he appointed to steal for him have perpetrated
for their own benefit in his name. And that fiscal cliff may never come.
Our class warfare is not determined by paycheck size. The United States has only two classes. The working class and the government class.
The working class extends through the lower class, the middle class and the upper class, and everyone of every income level who derives their income from gainful employment. The government class similarly extends from the poor to the middle class to the rich, and consists of those whose chief source of income is the government; whether it's welfare checks, government jobs or crony capitalism.
Not everyone in the working class is a saint and not everyone in the government class is a parasite. There are plenty of corporations who care only about short term profit and create social problems that the rest of the country has to live with. Immigration is a classic example. And there are also plenty of government employees who perform vital and even heroic functions. Your local firefighter and member of the armed services are obvious examples.
The government class is dependent on the working class, deriving its income from their income. The government class turns from the symbiotic to the parasitic to the extent that its demands on the working class become unsustainable and exploitative, that its functions grow bloated, its spending programs reek of corruption and its government contracts emerge out of backdoor deals with friendly politicians.
The government class can never be productive, because it is not a creative force, it only provides secondary non-innovative services to the working class, but it is legitimate to the extent that it performs vital functions on behalf of the working class with their consent and in an economically sustainable fashion. When it violates these principles, then it becomes a parasite sucking the life out of the working class.
It is not just the government employee who is a member of the government class. The welfare class is a subgroup of the government class. And the welfare class is not only parasitic, it is the axis around which an entire parasitic constellation of the government class revolves around.
The classic welfare family has become the income generating center of the government class. They are the "wealth creators" for an entire infrastructure of social services built around them from the government officials who process their aid forms to the social workers who provide them with benefit counseling to the employees of those clinics who provide them with health care, and the extra teachers hired to help raise standards at their perpetually failing schools, the drug counselors who help them get clean and the police officers who break up their fights.
All or almost all of these people are members of unions. Those unions have their own employees. Those union employees have their own politicians. The politicians provide grants to the community social welfare infrastructure and generous benefits for union contracts. All this money and influence spins around the welfare family, but they only benefit from a minute fraction of it.
Around their dungheap, fly community groups and a horde of other private non-profits, "advocating" for them while operating on government grants. The buildings they live in are affordable housing projects built for them by the government, and cleaned, managed and repaired for them by government employees.
When they go to the supermarket, they buy food with money from the government. When they go to the pharmacy, they get free medication from the government. The web of clinics, supermarkets and pharmacies are not part of the working class, they are subsidized by government money and prosper by feeding off that government class.
The seven members of the classic welfare family, Grandma, Ma and her five kids, are the axis around which thousands of government professionals revolve. Their dysfunctional state keeps an entire state of government employees, employed. And it is in the interest of those government employees to seek out and create such dysfunctional families by championing social policies that break up families and keep them down, under the pretense of helping them because those families are the cash cows of the government class.
In a hybrid economy, the differences between the government class and the working class aren’t always as obvious. There are any number of businesses, large and small, that are members of the government class, and derive the bulk of their income from the government.
The fundamental difference between the government class business and the working class business is that the government class business is an instrument of government policy. While its owner may derive value from it, the government class business only exists because it fulfills an objective of government policy. And that makes the government class business indistinguishable from the policy it represents.
As the government class expands, the number of individuals and businesses in the government class grows because joining the government class, whether as a welfare recipient, government employee or crony capitalist company is a better strategy than staying in the working class. Planned economies are easier to profit from in the short term, whether it's by getting free stuff, early retirement or contracts on generous terms, because their centralization makes them predictable and influence-able. The only problem is that they have no future.
American society has been reshaped to seek short cuts, whether it's through lottery tickets, credit cards or corporate mergers, at the expense of long-term profits through hard work. Corporations don't look past the next quarter and many people don't look past the next interest payment. And joining the government class is the ultimate shortcut. It wrecks families, trashes the economy and robs the country of its future, while providing limited short-term benefits to members of the government class.
Cities and towns are going bankrupt because government class unions asked for and got financially unsustainable benefit packages. Those small implosions are a metaphor for the tremendous harm that the government class is inflicting on the working class, and also, in the long term, on itself. In the long run, parasitism is not sustainable. In the short term, there's a great party. In the long term, the parasite dies.
The major development of the last decade has been the government's class disinterest in the economic sustainability of its demands. Call it the Californization of America under a government class that is both determined and doomed.
Obama has emerged as the champion of the government class, his complete disregard for the fiscal consequences of his actions, allows him to act as the champion of a predatory government class that lies and bludgeons its way through all obstacles like a horde of Black Friday shoppers, grabbing everything in sight, without caring about what will happen tomorrow.
Some might call this a cunning strategy, but it's not as if the government class has anywhere to advance to. Pulling the same trick in 1932 might have led to government control of industry and agriculture, but in 2012, this is a country that lives off service industries, not manufacturing. Going Full Communist is not an option, because there is hardly any manufacturing sector left and national agriculture is already so government controlled that there might as well be actual Commissars in charge of it.
Trying to nationalize chain stores, dot coms and the rest of the modern economy is not only hopeless, but it won't produce any income worth mentioning from an economy that is based more on marketing and price cutting, than on production. There are already plenty of government class businesses turning out government subsidized windmills and solar panels. There's no point to nationalizing them because they already serve as instruments of government policy, their owners are politically connected and they are already failing nearly as fast as they would if the government were running them.
The parasite has gotten so big that it believes that it is the host and that the host is the parasite. It is completely sincere about its attacks on the host and that makes it even more dangerous. Under the influence of its own propaganda, the government class has come to think of itself as productive and creative, and of the working class as a parasitic blot, holding on to the money that rightfully belongs to the government class. But just as parasites cannot survive without hosts, governments cannot survive without people to do the actual work.
The government class has shown that it is unwilling and unable to make the responsible decisions that need to be made. It is being led by liars and fools who see it as a lever for upending and taking over a working class society, and replacing it with a parasite's paradise of academics making laws, unions setting their own terms and a government that is always expanding and never contracting.
A host and a parasite of equal size cannot both survive for long. Either both the host and the parasite will die. Or the parasite will die and the host will live.
Daniel Greenfield is
a New York City based writer and blogger and a Shillman Journalism
Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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