Tangential anecdote: my former wife used to work for a company that operated megayacht marinas. Basically this company came about because some real-estate slumlord billionaire was salty because there weren’t enough places for him to park his giant-ass boat. So he started a company which provided facilities and amenities for fellow giant-ass-boat-owners. Russian oligarchs, Gulf princes, Silicon Valley dip****s, Jay Z...this was the clientele.
I mean, it was a job. It was a pure, by-god trickle-down job. Granted, the company was a bad employer and shady in a dozen different ways (shouldn’t say too much, but she was an accountant and our discussions about her future there usually ended with me saying “don’t sign your name on anything”). But it was a job. Damn, though, was also a clear window into something telling about our world. We had insight into giant-ass-boat-world, insight into struggling middle-class existence (our own experience) and, through my work, insight into the magnitude of poverty and need in our own community, which is affluent by world standards. I do think it’s worth asking questions about our societal incentives, about how wealth is created and inherited, how labor is valued and how this intersects with the common good.
We, the middle-class strivers, responsible, dual-employed homeowners, had more in common with the destitute than with the massively wealthy. Hell, we had more in common with the destitute than with the people in McMansionland half a mile away. We were always one significant life event away from a massive reversal of fortune.
Parenthetically, this economic anxiety might have made me a socialist, but I somehow managed to avoid becoming a racist. So there’s that, I guess.
Also parenthetically: it’s generalization, but this was another great opportunity to observe that extremely wealthy folks behave like rich folks’ stereotypes of poor people cheating on welfare. They work the system. They cheat whenever possible. Their leverage often allows them to screw their employees and they rarely are held accountable. One of the biggest failings of our society is that we don’t even treat so-called white-collar crime like crime at all. Yet we lionize the wealthy and demonize the poor, assuming that their failure to not be poor arises from some sort of moral defect. The system is stacked to ignore or excuse theft and fraud on a massive scale while punishing (and morally judging) it harshly when it happens on the street.
So, yeah. I think society is better served by more people having affordable access to child care, health care, and education, to the tools that allow them to avoid destitution. Cry me a ****ing river if it means that someone has to build a smaller boat.
