Yesterday, as I was handing1 out stickers2, which said we should remove the rich from power, at my local CVS drugstore a woman told me that we needed to keep the rich in power because only they created jobs. She said that if the rich were removed from power then no work would get done and it would be horrible for all of us.
Here’s how I replied.
You’re using the word ‘job’ to refer to just one particular way that useful work is done. Somebody having a job means that they are employed by a rich person to do what the rich person tells them to do, for the purpose of making money for the rich person. It means that the person with the job will be fired if he or she doesn’t do as the rich person orders. Well, that’s how most useful work is done today.
But in earlier times most of the useful work was done by slaves, not employees. Slaves were owned by slave owners and had to do what the slave owner ordered them to do or they could be killed.
Back in the days of ancient Greece, when the useful work was done by slaves, Aristotle said that there had to be slave owners because otherwise the useful work wouldn’t be done.3 If you had lived in ancient Greece, would you have told Aristotle he was wrong because useful work only happens when rich people create jobs for employees?
In about a quarter of Spain in the years 1936-9, the useful work was done by people working as equals with no rich and no poor. Furthermore, people this way produced MORE economic wealth than in the previous years of capitalism when work was done by people employed by the rich.4 If you had lived in Spain at this time, would you have told people that they needed to put the rich back in power in order to do useful work?
(I didn’t have time in this conversation to elaborate on how work is done in an egalitarian society and how absurd it is to think that it cannot happen unless there are rich people, but I wrote a little parable to illustrate that here.
At one point in this conversation I said that I thought the economy should be based on the no-rich-and-no-poor principle of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.” She nodded her head in approval of this principal but said it was impossible; it could never happen (even though I had already mentioned Spain where it did happen.)
I then said, “You started out by saying we should not remove the rich from power because useful work can only be done if the rich are in power. But now you’re saying that it would be nice to do useful work with no rich and no poor but making that happen is impossible. These are two very different opinions. Which is yours?”
This is when her Uber ride appeared to take her (and the suitcases she had with her) to the airport so she could fly home to Arizona where she was from.
During this conversation I said that in wanting to keep the rich in power, “You are part of an extremely tiny minority.” She said, “Well, of course I am in a tiny minority HERE in Massachusetts where you all are pro-woke and crazy. I am speaking in honor of Charlie Kirk.” This illustrates what I wrote about the Charlie Kirk phenomenon here. Boy would she have been surprised to learn that even at a PRO-TRUMP rally she would still have been a tiny minority in her wanting to keep the rich in power, as I discovered and wrote about here. Alas, she left before I could tell her this.
Like this:
Here’s the sticker:
Here are Aristotle’s exact words, by the way:
“That in a well-ordered state the citizens should have leisure and not have to provide for their daily wants is generally acknowledged, but there is a difficulty in seeing how this leisure is to be attained. The Thessalian Penestae have often risen against their masters, and the Helots [slaves—J.S.] in like manner against the Lacedaemonians, for whose misfortunes they are always lying in wait. Nothing, however, of this kind has as yet happened to the Cretans; the reason probably is that the neighboring cities, even when at war with one another, never form an alliance with rebellious serfs, rebellions not being for their interest, since they themselves have a dependent population. Whereas all the neighbors of the Lacedaemonians, whether Argives, Messenians, or Arcadians, were their enemies. In Thessaly, again, the original revolt of the slaves occurred because the Thessalians were still at war with the neighboring Achaeans, Perrhaebians, and Magnesians. Besides, if there were no other difficulty, the treatment or management of slaves is a troublesome affair; for, if not kept in hand, they are insolent, and think that they are as good as their masters, and, if harshly treated, they hate and conspire against them. Now it is clear that when these are the results the citizens of a state have not found out the secret of managing their subject population.”
— Aristotle: The Complete Works by Aristotle
Read about this in detail here and also here.