MY PURPOSE IN OLD AGE.

     When I first signed up on Facebook I used to type out to people whom I friended, or who friended me, that "I'm only here to piss-off righties, I don't do business online". I sort of got away from that in later years. No surprise, I would friend someone and after a while they would send me a message with the opening sentence, "Have you heard the good news?" At least I no longer get offered the opportunity to help a Nigerian prince.

     As a writer of not very high repute Facebook has been very helpful. I'm better at editing my responses and posts. My spelling is better, I don't abuse commas as much, and I have polished my short, pithy, replies. Sometimes I'm like a jaguar sitting on a limb waiting for a lame MAGAt to wander into range. And they do. Arrogantly puffing out their chests as if they were unapproachable. Trust me, my day is made on these people. And I do not feel bad insulting them. Those who persist in our discussion will sooner or later, usually sooner, my patience has not improved, get the insult they are due.

     Recently I had an exchange with a guy extolling the virtues of capitalism. In his world, as with so many others, capitalism is the better part of a manichean duality with communism the otherside of the economic counterfeit coin. We would remember that view of communism from the 1940s-50s. Democrats were liberal, liberals were socialists, socialists were communists. The smarter ones would throw in Marxism to throw us off of the scent, to show that they might have read Marx, before they wised up. 

     I will admit that socialism emerged into my economic model in what I might call my late middle-age. I'm no Christian but it is not hard to imagine Jesus teachings as being Marxist. Those most ardent Christians do not seem to agree. I describe myself as a socialist in the vein of FDR and John Maynard Keynes. This is enough to confuse them. What prompts me to go to my arsenal of insults are those who, back in the 90s, thought Ron Paul's Austrian Free-market economics was the solution to our economic troubles, nearly all of which could be attributed to the lesser version of free-market economists like Milton Friedman, of the Chicago School of Economics. I'm not a betting man but I would bet a years Social Security checks that few if any of these morons would know who Friedrich Hyack and Ludwig Mises were, though they were the Austrians of Austrian Free-market Economics. Back in the 2010s I ran across a book in the library by Friedrich Hyack titled (rather over-dramatically) The Road to Serfdom. By Serfdom he was not talking about hanging ten. I had heard Michelle Bachman mention reading Hyack and Mises on her summer break from Congress. I can confidently say that Ms Bachman is the mother of Congressional stupid. Sarah Palin might be the grandmother, Lauren Boburt and Marjory Taylor Green might be her daughters. I read Hyacks book, written in 1936. I did not pursue Mises book, who's name I've blessedly forgotten. My conclusion was, and still is, that The Road to Serfdom begs to become the subject of satire. Hyack's laughable premise was that taxation and regulation will put capitalists on that road to Serfdom. This economic idea, it is not qualified to be a theory, does not consider that some very wealthy people have, throughout history, used their wealth for nefarious ends. The thought I suppose was that we would restrain the criminal urges of people who run for political office by sharing the wealth with them. I must remind you that this was back when Donald Trump was the subject of ridicule for New Yorkers, and uninteresting to the rest of us. What Hyack forgets is the history of the serf. They lived and died on the nobles estate. The noble earned his estate by doing the monarchs dirty work. The only way the serf could escape Serfdom was to join the King's Navy, or other military force. With luck they would survive the battles with most of their limbs intact, and less often, they would be rewarded for their heroism. The Noble on the other hand, be they Duke or Earl, or Viscount, or some other honor bestowed by the monarchy, had property and status. With luck that would become great wealth, usually accompanied by a great crime. Victor Hugo gave us that wisdom. If not, if they should pile up gambling debts, or spend their fortune in brothels, they still had titles. They could, "marry up". Serfs remained serfs.

     Something happened sometime around the mid-14th century. People began to die with horrible pustules on their bodies. Bubonic plague. For some twenty years it ravaged Europe, affecting all levels of society (ahem) democratically. Nearly half of Europe did not survive. There were a fortunate few who had an immunity to the plague. They were the survivors and life changed rapidly for them. The various nobles had the money to flee Europe. If they fled by ship, they would have shared cabin-space with the rat that carried the flea, that spread the plague. If they traveled by coach, they may have been following the Bubonic plague into other nations. The hapless serf had no money to travel, and no decent medical care. So they remained to do what they were there for, to increase the nobles wealth, and die a miserable death one way or the other. A side note here: serfs were not slaves in the North-American sense. They were more like sharecroppers. The noble at the end of harvest would give the serf a share of the profits, less loans and other debts. As you might expect, they had no one to intercede on their behalf with the noble, should they feel like they were cheated.

     Those serfs who survived the plague, while the noble and his family fled, were the people who took the produce to market in the masters absence. Naturally, they might have remembered times when they were cheated, and kept the masters profits for themselves. In time, the surviving serfs might have made shoes from cowhide, candles from rendered tallow, beer from the nobles grains, and other products. Markets became bustling population centers and economies began to look more like what we would imagine.The kings taxman still collected the taxes, and the ferry man charged the serf more, because they could. But they paid the tax because they had extra money at the end of the harvest. It was win-win for the serf.

    So this guy is lecturing me on the noble qualities of capitalism and the dangers of socialism. I counter by telling him for perhaps the first time that there is a spectrum of socialism, as there is with capitalism. Marx and Engels wished to protect the workers during the industrial age from corporate greed. A not unheard of aspect of capitalism augmented by bribing people in power, legislators and Supreme Court Justices among them. I reminded him that Democrats allowed unions to grow, and Republicans are trying to weaken unions even more. He still could not understand the wider spectrum of economics. So my final piece was that I would encourage capitalism as exhibited by Taylor Swift, George Soros, and even Warren Buffett, and that we needed fewer capitalists like Charles Koch and Harlen Crow. I have not heard from him since.