Marx My Words

You can't say stuff like that without being called a Marxist. I can't, anyway. But here's the obvious thing that teabaggers can't seem to get through their conspiratorial Foxobeckian heads: when enough "average" people are unable to make financial ends meet; when they don't have a little extra jingle in their pockets to buy stuff, those CEOs can't sell it. And then the system breaks down.

It's in order to preserve capitalism (or, as they prefer to call it in Texas, because "capitalist" has ugly connotations, "free markets") that people are raising alarms about the enormous and getter enormouser wealth gap in this country. No one -- no one with any credibility, or ability to make it happen, anyway -- is calling for some sort of sweeping leveling of income. Paying a McDonald's worker the same as a skilled machinist. Or A-Rod. But what if CEOs only made, say fifty times their workers? Or twenty? Couple million a year ought to get most people by, right? What if businesses, like Henry Ford did, figured that their workers ought to make enough to buy the products they make? Wouldn't they, in the long run, recoup much of the increased overhead in greater sales to more people with the wherewithal?

So, how do you make such a thing happen? Clearly, in the US of A, with teabaggRs pulling the strings, you don't. Because communism. Because something. But, as with pretty much everything else they're espousing, in the long run they're dragging us down the path to ruination. Climate change denial. Disuneducating our kids. Suppressing workers' right. Tilting the scales more and more toward those with the most power. It might work fine in their lifetimes. But the next in line, even their own kids? Sorry. Not important. Besides, by then they'll all be raptured up, right?