A Modest Proposal
For preventing the poor, wage workers, the un-gentrified and Mother Nature from being a burden on the Alpha class of the country and for making them beneficial to the publick.
“I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food . . . .”
— Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal, 1729
Published on http://www.truth-out.org
It is a melancholy object to those who travel through these American towns, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads and public places crowded with beggars, welfare recipients, the perennially unemployed, the wastrel gadabouts, the gangbangers, malcontents and whiners, the Losers of scant ambition but to feed on the Winners, importuning at every turn the Federal Government for all manner of “freebies.”
This lot, instead of being willing to work for their honest livelihood, spend all their energies scheming for food stamps, unemployment compensation, rent control, legal aid, earned income tax credit, welfare without work, Medicaid benefits and all that can be gotten when a politics of endless aid to the parasites of our society is at the wheel of government. I propose a zero-tolerance for such devilment and the Federal Government from which it originates.
I think it is agreed by all parties that both the Winners and the Losers would be best served if the Losers were cut free of government handouts and thus, like a child ready to walk and free of his mother’s hand, step out and develop those skills necessary to earn a living in the world. Thereby whoever was thus liberated would soon be filled with a personal ambition to succeed, a will to compete and, most wonderfully, a keen desire to assume personal responsibility for either success or failure on the most consistently level playing field that our society offers and the world has ever seen. The real glory – as Mr. Lombardi reminded us – is being knocked to your knees and then coming back. Without a good knocking, no glory can ensue. The miscreant class is already on their knees and it is best, for their own sake, to keep them there if they fail to rise on their own.
Those who contribute nothing to society, but sponge off the success of others thanks to the largesse of Liberal taxation are in no way ennobled by such a practice. If such liberality is ended, there is a possibility that such liberation will cause a man to stand on his own two feet, get into the arena and compete, perhaps start a business. Those habituated to handouts will not rise and walk, whether they are on the dole or not.
The liberation must be as sudden, penetrating and extensive as to rouse the lethargic and insensate in the same manner that electrical shock treatment of the addled jacks them up to a new state of being. Any attenuation of the dramatic change sought will not only give time for a scam defense, but a condemning outcry from coddling Liberals.
My intention is very far from being confined to the lazy beggars, but extends to the Wage Class, to those who live precariously on the fumes of lost middle class well-being and fading memories of vibrant workers’ unions who could bargain with the proprietary class for wages and conditions of employment, who lived in neighborhood communities neither gated nor underwater. May I remind the reader that living on the fumes of yesterday preempts the rewards of today?
I can think of not one objection to driving the dependent to their knees where they may find the strength to compete and succeed, perhaps to start a business.
Such success can be properly recognized and admired by those who have themselves competed freely, encouraging all toward a conversion of a loss to a win, a debit to a credit. Those who suckle on the Government Teat can never know what winning is. They fail to applaud the winning in other,s but rather endlessly moan and groan and vote for the Liberal who promises them succor from cradle to grave. They can neither comprehend their own responsibility in their failures, nor recognize what a sad dehumanized state to which their dependency has brought them.
Let no man talk to me of the virtues of denying his fellow man the chance to test his mettle, the opportunity to be free to choose his own course in life. To those who accuse me of a lack of compassion, I observe that those who lack all self-respect and the necessary will to win that survival demands cannot be saved by Liberal largesse from the deserving fate that awaits such feckless lives. The highest note of humanity is played by enabling shorter life spans to those failures whose misery would be prolonged by misguided benevolence.
A perennial scene of misfortune and tragedy result from all blockades to self-initiative. These continue because a misguided notion of compassion is at work as when the sapless watch a wounded creature suffer and fail to put a bullet in its head.
The mothering that will not end rears the child who is never free to discover his own worth, perhaps start a business.
I am not so violently bent upon my own opinion as to reject the play of Chance in the lives of both Winners and Losers. But before Chance can be allowed to reconnect the miscreants to the Government Teat, I need point out that the accidents that lay some low are no more than opportunities for others to rise higher. Climbing out of a trash can and into fame and fortune is the essence of the American Dream. Deprive a man of the trash can and you deprive him of the American Dream. No one should be denied that privilege.
Further, the man who is self-empowered and projects his will into the world is less liable to be detoured by Chance and more prepared to face the consequences than the man whose life will fall apart if a monthly hardship allowance is not received. The aged do not find themselves suddenly aged but have had a lifetime to prepare for the event. Similarly, poverty, whether lifelong or sudden, upends only the lives of the dependent and un-self-reliant. Those who make the future for themselves are not waylaid by Chance as are those who put their lives in the hands of others and like Dickens’ Micawber expect something “to turn up.”
As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for many years upon this important subject of Chance and maturely weighed the several schemes erected to keep the weak man from blaming the Goddess Fortuna for what should clearly be laid at his own doorstep, I have concluded that straight talk is required.
None can doubt that a series of misfortunes, one upon the other, can come upon a man so hard and so swift that no act of legerdemain can change lamentations to hallelujahs. And there is no concealing the fact that Chance plays a part in the Winner’s life as well as the Loser’s. It is, however, not in the interests of the Winner to admit this, neither in his life nor in the life of the Loser. The Loser’s fate may be partially of his own making or not at all but such shirking is no more than what we expect from Losers. Winners, on the other hand, accept Losers as a natural result of their own winning. A zero-sum game in which for one man to win another must lose replaces Chance with an inviolable creed.
There is then, in short, no way for the Loser to free himself from the Winners’ arrangement of Chance and the sooner such appeals are terminated, the sooner Losers will face up to the Winners’ arrangement of all. All efforts to plead conditions and circumstances, from slow witted genetics, parental abuse and slum level poverty to wallet draining cancer, loss of limb, sight and job and so on, should impact the Loser in the same way they impact the Winner: as the excuses of those who fail to assume personal responsibility. I propose that we drive hard, pedal to the metal, in re-orienting society from excuses to responsibility and declare a zero tolerance for excuses.
If we push the envelope toward a totally cold turkey treatment in all those places in which some Liberal and Socialist tempering of the efficiency of Market Rule is at work, we will very quickly be able to separate those few who are unfortunate through no fault of their own and those upon whom personal connivery is at play. And the discrimination required must be local for it is well-known that every neighbor has a tale to tell of whose plight is legitimate and whose plight is a scam. We then rely on the disposition of informed, targeted private scrutiny in the same fashion as we rely on private philanthropy rather than the blind bureaucratic dispensing of welfare that taxation enables.
I have been assured by a very knowing Mauritanian slave owner of my acquaintance in New York that if the wages of the American Salaried Class were to be uniformly and immediately dropped to the 2000 taka a month paid to Bangladeshi workers, a very wholesome upswing in top 20% prosperity would result, thus benefitting that class. At the same time, the bottom 80% would experience relief from the anxieties of modern life by being thrown, like a Finn out of the sauna and into frigid waters, into feudal circumstances.
The virtues of medieval peasantry are many, from a reassuring faith in the Hereafter to a secure sense of place and purpose in feudal society. This seems clearly preferable to the apprehensions and insecurities of 80% of the American population, half of them without any sense of place and purpose and the other half moaning over a defunct well-being.
There should be no Liberal pretense and delay in rushing the Losers into a feudal way of life. The certainty of that state will incite a will to power aborted at birth by Liberal nanny-ism.
I do therefore humbly offer it to publick consideration that 63 million will rest easily in gentrified fashion, with all the perks accrued, while 252 million have a shot at reaping the undeniable benefits that a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short can deliver as cleanly as a bullet to the brain. The struggle begins or has a chance to begin and the competitive spirit is awakened when the cost of living itself is pumped to the max. This agrees with the perennial wisdom of “What Doesn’t Kill You, Makes Your Stronger.”
Thus the Gentrified Squire will learn to expand his life’s longevity by the intake of organic, non-toxic food at gourmet emporiums, the assistance of personal fitness trainers, nutritionalists, “talking cure” analysts, illegal nannies, gardeners, cooks, personal assistants, house cleaners and body guards, as well as platinum level health care, including access to the organs of young peasants.
Those who are most thrifty among the Lost and Losing classes may live long enough to receive Social Security benefits had that age not been raised to accord with the Gentrified class’s increased longevity and not their own, which, unfortunately and in no way owing to the stochastic nature of Market Rule efficiency, has decreased.
I propose the matter to be inconsequential if socialized security is replaced by a privatized “pay as you go” arrangement thus giving some 252 million of population an opportunity to assume personal responsibility for their last years of solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short existence. The carrot of trophy wives, extensive real estate holdings, obedient servants, gold bars, luxury yachts and ready-to-hand organ transplants pushes every man forward except those whose indolence has been nurtured and whose will-to-power unmanned.
As things now stand, matters of illness and health, crime and law, defense and war, education and schooling are managed in ways that maximize illness, crime, war and ignorance. This travesty is achieved by putting forth “the public good” rather than “private concern,” public expenditure rather than personal profit.
If hospitals and emergency rooms were not forced to provide “charity care,” not only would profits to shareholders increas,e but the poor would take better care of their health and, possibly, work toward being able to pay for their health care. I think it is agreed by all parties that if a man cannot muster sufficient power of will to lead a healthful life then it matters not at all if the Federal Government provides him with affordable health insurance or not.
The sooner a man faces his own mortality — and illness is the great conveyor here of that message — the greater the chance that he will opt for health and long life, if, of course, the illness, without medical help, does not kill him. However, any interference with this “tough love” accommodates Liberal compassion but brings no man closer to assuming responsibility for his own life. Unnecessary cost is added to inevitable tragedy.
If the law were privatized, crimes and criminals would be pursued on a “pay as you go” basis, thus affording another level of protection for the Gentry class who has the wherewithal to define what they see as a crime, pursue perpetrators in private courts and confine them in private prisons. Those who cannot avoid the misfortunes of thievery, murder and mayhem in their own neighborhoods will come immediately face to face with the brutish aspect of their lives and thus, once again, be incentivized to get a job and possibly start a business.
I desire those politicians who declare wars and pursue them to step aside and leave all war making decisions to private enterprise, which is best able to conduct war for profit. What does it gain a country if it wins a war but shareholders suffer a loss? Privatized warfare steps back from all engagements in which a quick return on investment is not forthcoming, except in those cases where a slow and long term profit making campaign is being waged.
I am studious of brevit,y so I will state that without public tax support there will be no public education, but only “pay as you go” education, thus, once again, incentivizing parents on government hand-outs to get off their arses and pay for their children’s education. A man who cares not whether his children are educated will hardly be amended in this uncouthness whether the Federal Government picks up the tab or does not. The virtues of for profit, privatized education are many, not the least being a curriculum that prepares students to start a business.
Many disadvantages can be enumerated when regulatory agencies intrude amorphous and contentious social concerns into the efficient workings of Market Rule. First, as things now stand, Federal Government sanctuary and bail outs for the casualties of creative destruction are putting a drag not only on global competitiveness but also on an inevitable rush to the bottom that the useless must face. Character building epiphanies are forestalled by governmental interjections. And secondly, interrupting market efficiency in order to protect and preserve an environment that we control and adapt to suit human needs is preposterous. Human civilization has been built on bringing Nature to heel and not the reverse. Here again we need to push the envelope, in this case, by not de-accelerating growth through technology but pushing it further, heedless of climate change, toxic air, water, food, plastics and so on.
Any retreat from pushing the envelope of technology, as with hampering Market Rule, will only succeed in diminishing the innovative drive as well as the intensity of competition that results when the game of survival of the fittest is not corrupted by French notions of fraternity and cryptic, lunatic Gaia bonds with the planet.
The faster we muck up air, water and earth, the faster will our responding technology grow, the faster will that tech take those who have the price of a ticket off the planet and onto a whole new world which we will subject, as we have on this planet, to the wondrous efficiency of Market Rule. Those who doubt this need only observe how Iraq has benefited from the sudden, unchallenged implementation of Market Rule under the leadership of special Presidential Envoy Paul Bremer. Those who unpatriotically believe that the poisoning of the planet will stump human technology can expect that the gated compounds of the Gentry will be domed and that the purest oxygen will be pumped in.
Market Rule efficiency will push technology to its profit making limits and should be allowed to do so without concessions to the whims and tantrums of Mother Nature. To repeat: We should push Mother Nature to the limits and thus incite those technological innovations that Mankind produces in response, thus augmenting profits to those positioned to reap them.
Ice and meteors were planetary catastrophes in name only but in truth opportunities Nature provided for the very beginning of human civilization. We are now able to push Nature toward new cataclysmic events without fear because we have reached a level of technological inventiveness that is more than able to respond to the benefit of those positioned to benefit.
The planet Earth will be left behind the way Detroit was left behind by the wealthy after the 1967 riots, the fate of the planet, like that of Detroit, bankruptcy.
A flight propelled by fear of angry indigents will in the future be a well-planned departure and not a fearful escape. When we “creatively destroy” the planet, we do so consistent with a mission of unstoppable growth in full expectation that technological innovation and human inventiveness will take us to a higher plane. Private space travel entrepreneurship and Google sponsored robotic technology are not products of a retrogressive, nostalgic imagination but an aggressive, forward looking imagination. Virgin Galactic now offers a $250,000 seat to space for 600 wishing to join the most exclusive club in the world and so the seeds of leaving behind an exhausted and poisoned planet have already been planted. While cowardly and fatigued imaginations envision humans as victims of technology, those who imagine outside the box of apprehensiveness foresee a cyborg amalgam of human and computer impervious to sickness, to cancer and death itself.
In a manner similar to pushing all non-human fauna on the planet to their own end as speedily as possible, sparing them the slow painful dissolve and extinction that a “creative destruction” of their environment foretells, or, pitiable confinement in cages, we must more ambitiously push the feckless from their roosts and engage in a gentrification of the planet. This is already begun in the cities. The universe is there to be gentrified, a fact that a Gentry class, swollen with stock market gains, realizes as it invades the last of the smart and faddish locations on the planet.
I can think of no one objection to releasing to the freedom of homeless tent camps and the joys of communal, shanty town favela life those who now stubbornly and tastelessly occupy real estate greedily eyed by the New Gentry.
The lesson to be learned here is simple and elegant: The faster the Losers face the conditions of their own plight, the faster will they be motivated to change those conditions. Meanwhile, the New Gentry must swallow whole that choice real estate which ill suits the pedigree of its current squatters. This is being done in Los Angeles, Tampa, Portland, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington DC, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston and New York City with the same speed and relish as the Lenape tribes were pushed out of Manhattan in the 18th century.
Such a project has been underway quite successfully in New York City, true to its legacy of commandeering real estate at wampum prices, under the lordly guidance of Mr. Bloomberg. Developers, spurred on by cash in hand New Gentry, are evicting and thus liberating the non-gentrified of Red Hook in Brooklyn, who for their part will ride that horse of freedom across a frontier never before envisioned in American egalitarian democracy, a frontier that as Rod Serling intoned “not of time nor space but of mind.”
My ancestor, Dean Swift, was metaphorical only in advising that the Irish eat their babies and thus improve the quality of their lives. We need to eat up the world and all its resources and turn a deaf ear to the Liberals of Retrogression who would have us check our own energies, shackle our own creativity. We need to eat up the Losers, swallow them in the voracious maw of globalized techno-capitalism and thus allow them, as Mother Nature allows the wretched caterpillar to turn into a Monarch, the chance, now denied them, to metamorphose beyond servitude.
We need to swallow this planet and everything in it in order to fulfill our human destiny. Our destiny is to utilize our consciousness of our own destiny, which no other creature on the planet shares and the will to power that develops from that consciousness to truly own this world.
I modestly propose that we not back away from such ownership merely because there are many who are not fit for the struggle and who seek the leadership of the weak. As Sarah Palin reminds us: “Only dead fish go with the flow.” I propose that we not join hands in a brotherhood of the enfeebled and impotent, grinding out our days in one step forward and two back, setting ourselves up for a tragic apocalypse, a hopeless defeat in the way that cowards always defeat themselves before the battle begins.
I profess, in the same words as Dean Swift, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the publick good of my country. We face a moral imperative to allow an efficient market to raise all boats, to liberate Losers from the apron strings of the Federal Government and permit them the opportunity to know what Aristotle so wisely said, “Happiness depends on ourselves,” and to resist the call to put the unconscious force of Nature before the technological growth of civilization.
