Federal subsidies built forces that drive our economy
By Michael Mahoney
Reading Bruce VanDenburgh’s right-wing diatribe in the May 3
Daily Bruin ("The appeal of living in our right-wing country")
reminded me (as if I needed to be reminded) what big whiners
capitalists are.
VanDenburgh, obviously fresh off a reading of Ayn Rand, seems to
feel that the "non-producers" of the world are a bunch of ingrates
unaware of the tremendous favor capitalists are doing them by
subsidizing their bellyaching. Maybe one day, like in "Atlas
Shrugged," the capitalists upon whom this world depends will say
"enough is enough" and teach everybody else a lesson. Yeah,
right.
I just want to ask: who is supporting whom? Employers pay their
workers as little as they can get away with, while merchants charge
consumers as much as they can get away with. In the middle of it
all, employers and merchants justify themselves by saying they need
to "cover costs."
But if "covering costs" was the whole story, then top-level
managers wouldn’t be getting luxury care in private hospitals while
their lowest-paid workers bankrupt themselves dealing with the
smallest medical problem; and inner-city shopowners wouldn’t be
driving Cadillacs to work while their "patrons" scrape some pennies
together just to eat for the night. No, it’s not "covering costs,"
it’s exploitation. It’s exploitation whenever property owners get
rich off the wealth created by the poorly paid workers under
them.
And then these capitalists have the nerve to complain about the
workers who subsidize the capitalists’ wealth through their own
poverty. They complain about workers striking for better wages
when, even if the unions win, they’ll still be richer than the
workers. They complain about unemployed workers, when it is the
enormous labor surplus created by the masses of the unemployed that
drives down the cost of labor and allows capitalists to make even
greater profits. The unemployed should be paid for that kind of
service to management, not be kicked in the face.
The capitalists even complain about the poverty of the world,
when that poverty is driven by capitalism’s constant urge toward
cheaper labor and cheaper raw materials. Let’s face it: you can’t
have cheap chocolate mousse and mahogany tables when you’re paying
workers a living wage to extract the raw materials necessary to
make those things.
If capitalists were really against welfare, they wouldn’t accept
payment from people on welfare who come to buy their products and
put that money right back into the capitalists’ pockets. If they
were really against welfare, they wouldn’t accept government
contracts, let alone government subsidies.
Let’s get one thing straight: high tech, aerospace and
telecommunications, the industrial sectors that are driving our
economy right now, were all subsidized in their developmental
stages by Uncle Sam. After the U.S. people, through the U.S.
government, took all the risks, financial or otherwise, in getting
these industries off the ground, they were promptly privatized, to
the enormous profit of U.S. big business. Don’t let anybody tell
you that it’s the capitalists who take all the risks.
One smart person said, "The rich who hold the reins know how to
win back what they spend." Another one who was even smarter said,
"The next time a rich man tries to tell you how he earned his
fortune through hard work, ask him, ‘Whose?’" If anybody’s asses
are subsidized, they are the ones that belong to the "right wing"
capitalists VanDenburgh loves so much.
Mahoney is a history graduate student.