First the Family Farmer, Now the Middle Class

Torre del Paine, Chile - photo by JoAnn Sturman

by Mike Burnaugh

Back in 1956, yes! 1956! The nationwide high school debate topic was agricultural parity. For the uninitiated, that was the idea that farmers had a right to set prices, say to the level in World War I, no matter the relative supply and demand in 1956. So if supply had doubled and demand not so much, the government would pay the farmer the difference between the free market and the parity price. Long before 1956, surpluses began to mount. The government had mountains of cheese, wheat, and what have you. It enabled us to fight famines around the world and to fatten food stamp recipients with more cheese than a body needs, but it was becoming a BIG problem.

1956 was an election year, and the first televised conventions were fantastically popular. As a boy of thirteen I took in platform committee hearings and watched as delegates actually voted on every plank in the platform. It really was democracy in action, and both parties promised then, and for many conventions thereafter, to fight for the family farmer.

I know you are asking yourselves just how that worked out. The family farmer was disappearing, and now is mostly gone, due to a thing called economies of scale. Farmers with a lot of land could afford more machinery and fertilizer and made more money than family farmers. It was obvious to everyone but politicians. Fast forward to 2012, another election year. We no longer pretend convention delegates have any input into political platforms. The nominees do not intend to be bound by a platform, as they intend to lie, promising to be on every possible side of every issue, sometimes in the same city on the same day.

This time around, every candidate swears eternal fealty to the middle class. Hide the women and children! The politicians are going to save us!

Beginning with the IBM announcement in the early part of the decade of the eighties that they had invented a personal computer, the fate of the commercial and business middle class was sealed. Since the days of the pyramids, there had been an organizational pyramid. Mel Brooks was at the top, shooting peasants instead of skeet (It’s good to be King!). He spoke to three or four, each of whom spoke to three or four, until the bottom layer of the pyramid actually did something.

Multiple layers of management began to melt away. Department stores became warehouses. Then some sadist invented the internet (Damn you, Al Gore!), and many businesses are now totally unnecessary, as Amazon can now sell everybody a book from the same warehouse. The printers of books need no sales force to sell to the stores, nor stores to sell to the public. Now, Amazon will sell you a Kindle, and we don’t even need books. The pyramid has become a column with a broad base in two of the three bastions of the middle class. Then there is the government.

The government is about power, not profit. The pyramid is alive and well in the governments of America. Eliminate positions? I laugh! The more employees, the bigger the budget. Waste is power! Let’s look at how just one department guarantees more work for itself despite the computer revolution: Social Security Disability.

Say you are horribly disabled by disease or accident, and you are blind and a quadriplegic. Your family applies for disability. You wait. After months or years, you are turned down, and appeal. After months or years you win. You are no doubt asking yourselves, “Why the delay?” Silly you. First we hire morons who cannot file paperwork. Then we automatically deny aid to the obviously qualified to create more paperwork, and an entirely new cadre of appellate judges with their staff to sort it all out.

Multiply that by every department of government and you begin to see the problem. Oh, yes, there is one more thing: Every department has a different computer system that cannot speak to another department. It’s good to be the King’s flunky!

People keep applying to MBA programs thinking they will work their way up the pyramid, only to discover there is NO entry level, so MBA’s start the dot com revolution and achieve little, except to alert existing companies to the online revolution. Now all the MBA's want to be Hedge Fund Managers. The greatest MBA of all from My Alma Mater, University of Chicago, was, is, and always shall be John Corzine. Isn’t he a gem? Hire me! I can be just as good as he, whether as head of Goldman Sachs, a Senator, Governor, or Hedge Fund Manager. No? Then I won’t give up my day job as Jeeves the Gardener.

Take heart. Water always finds its true level. The current campaign to save the middle class means we must not EVER think about cutting back on government jobs. If we fire them, wherever shall they go? Whatever shall they do? I think you know the answer.