I hope to conclude my inaugural topic of comparing earning and deserving across time, and their possible effect on our ideas of what we earn today, in this post. I hope to conclude it by providing some examples of the use of the word earn when discussing individual or class wealth and income. I have said much about beliefs about earning and deserving in our own time so I wanted to present some examples of them. Most of the examples of American beliefs about earning, work ethic, etc. are demonstrated simple by talking to people we know. Still, I took on some Google searches to find examples.

Many of you may remember a 2012 reelection campaign speech by President Obama in which he, in so many words, was trying to make the point that even successful persons had help in achieving their success. This was of course the July 13, 2012 “You Didn’t Build That” speech that caused such a furious reaction from the American right, much of this fury channeled through the Mitt Romney presidential campaign. Of course, what Obama said was taken out of context. The eminently non-socialist Obama meant was trying remind the egotists who take far too much credit for their own success that they too, were helped along and needed other people and that the infrastructure needed for business and markets to thrive are provided at public expense. He did not literally say successful persons, entrepreneurs, workers, etc., play no part in their own success. C’mon. Who did say all of this much better so it could not be misconstrued was the far more admirable Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts…

I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.’ No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along (Source: Wikipedia, “You didn’t build that” article)

Well-said, Senator Warren. Transportation networks are indeed built at public expense and we do not have to worry about “marauding bands” sweeping in and ripping us off, —of the products of our labor (and perhaps killing us) the means to produce it. Commerce also depends on such infrastructure, including an educated, literate and numerate workforce, but she could have gone even farther by pointing out that government-funded research in telecommunications and information technology are the basis of many fortunes in Silicon Valley and other places. Along the lines of ideas spouted in my first two posts, we can take this chain of thought another way and find a long historical lineage behind the spectacular technologies available today, and plug these straight in to any successful person. By this I mean the quote attributed to Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”; Newton was referring to other scientists who came before him, such as Johannes Kepler, I would imagine, upon whose work his brilliant work was built.

These ideas are germane to my first two posts, which concern the notion that we cannot truly earn all that we acquire and work for because we work less and have more than those in the past. Those in the future will probably work even less than us and have even more. Therefore, some of what we claim we earn, or take credit for, is in fact the result of the era into which we are born, over which we have no control. Part of the credit for what we earn and what we have then, is undeniably not our own doing. So strictly speaking none of us “built that” all on our own. Yet many people take sole credit, and many examples of this can be found in the reaction to Obama’s speech…

Way to go pres………show the world how damn out of touch with the system you can be. The two businesses I owned succeeded by my hard work [my italics]. The government just wanted taxes. He doesn’t have the credentials to govern because he don’t understand business (Comments on “Local Business Owners Respond to Obama’s Speech”, found at myfoxatlanta.com)

Since this business person, who probably does work hard, was probably born mid-20^th Century, some of what his “hard work” can bring him is attributable to that fact. Hence, there’s more to it than just his admirable personal industry.

Another example of a response to Obama’s speech comes from conservative author and now filmmaker Dinish D’Souza. I will link the brief interview by Fox News host Megyn Kelly , in which he discusses his film America and comments about Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech: http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2014/04/29/exclusive-dinesh-dsouza-moral-underpinning-obama/

This is taken from the interview transcript…

KELLY: Can you suggest the — that that [the supposed claim by the left that all earned in America is stolen] is by design, that they do that in order to basically guilt people into thinking — and shame them about success and wealth. And then to justify policies that tap into that wealth.

D’SOUZA: Exactly. The people who have wealth and the people who earn money are going to be a little reluctant to part with it, particularly if they earned it fair and square.

See? We could be talking about any amount of money that “people who have wealth” have possibly earned. Because they have earned it legally, it does not mean that our laws and our system are necessarily just and that they earned their wealth “fair and square”. I have brought up a good reason to believe that it is not all necessarily “fair and square”. We should instead take a critical view and question all the factors that go into wealth creation under capitalism, especially when it involves political, economic, and cultural control of the populace at large.

A recent book entitled The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAffee sums up very well what I have been talking about and what Dinesh D’Souza and many others forget. Here is a quote from the book concerning beloved and highly successful author J.K. Rowling, the “world’s first billionaire author”. The authors of Second Machine Age quote Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University…

Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolkien all earned much less [than Rowling]. Why? Consider homer, he told great stories but he could earn no more in a night than say 50 people might pay for an evening’s entertainment. Shakespeare did a little better. The Globe Theater 3000 and unlike Homer, Shakespeare didn’t have to be at the theater to earn. Shakespeare’s words were leveraged (p. 150).

The authors go on to say that “Technology has supercharged the ability of authors like Rowling to leverage their talents via digitization and globalization…[she] and other superstar storytellers now reach billions of customers through a variety of channels and formats”. By “leveraged” the authors mean that the “superstar storytellers” of today take advantage of global marketing networks.http://ts4.mm.bing.net/th?id=HN.6080473508 33021371&pid=15.1&P=0 are a product of our era. These are advantages that Homer, Tolkien, and Shakespeare did not have because they are from different eras. I will argue that the trio mentioned are far more deserving than Rowling, and I do not at all dislike Rowling, although I am not very interested in any of the Harry Potter series or fantasy literature in general. Another example of beliefs about earnings in our country is one of the infamous Tea Party signs…

http://ts4.mm.bing.net/th?id=HN.6080473508 33021371&pid=15.1&P=0

Here we find a rather arrogant and ignorant person who has a not surprisingly unreflective attitude to all he or she has accrued (to borrow a distinction used by the great John Kenneth Galbraith), some of which we can generously grant he or she has earned. Luckily that kind of “work ethic” cannot be spread like peanut butter. That kind of “work ethic” in fact leads to a sort of fantasy world of two sorts of people, the hard-working and the lazy. To them it’s a just world because no other factors really make the socioeconomic world what it is (if you want more about ‘just world’ beliefs, see more about Just World Theory—you’ll have to Google it).

One last Tea Party sign as an example of a common American belief about wealth…

 

Germane to our discussion is of course the sign (in the photo’s right side) reading “This is America, We Don’t Redistribute Wealth, You Earn It” (my italics). Again, I’d point out that your position in life (e.g., era of birth, geography of birth) is an undeniable determinant of what you are able to earn. Look, I like the idea of overcoming adversity, too, but let’s be frank and not take too much credit for what we do. Look at it realistically before it goes to your head and you’ll be all the better for it, so will other people. Looked at another way, if it were really true that we do not “redistribute wealth”, then how come so much wealth has been redistributed toward the already absolutely filthy rich in recent decades? Thank you, Gipper, free-market economics.

One of these I found was at a financial and other self-help site named ambarance-do.org. Their page What Are Your Beliefs About Money and Wealth? (http://ambafrance-do.org/wealth-building/54720.php), which is a guide to changing your own self-defeating beliefs about money and wealth so you can make plenty of it, stated that “Everything you have right now, YOU created”. Persons instilling this belief would be more empowered to amass personal wealth because they would stop blaming outside forces and “others around you”. Now taking in mind the one outside aspect under discussion (the era into which you were born), “YOU” did not “create” all that you have, although you may have had a lot to do with it (note: certainly this is admitting that human beings do have a degree of autonomy is by no means my assenting that whatever persons may achieve is just or moral). How much you had to do with personal success under capitalism can still be examined beyond the factor of the era into which you were born. We can really begin to put things under a microscope. For example, I had also mentioned place of birth. The hardest-working person in Zimbabwe may have his or her innovative and socially-useful business undermined by a lack of infrastructure (e.g., transportation networks) and a corrupt government. In fact, any discussion of what makes anything what it is can only be honest if we take into account other things around it. A school of philosophy and method, starting in Ancient Greece, China, and other parts of the world, brilliantly developed by G.W.F. Hegel, then brilliantly “turned on its head” by Karl Marx, is partially founded upon this fact. It is called dialectics (Source: The Accessible Hegel by Michael Allen Fox). Can anyone write an accurate biography of Abraham Lincoln, say, by isolating him from what was going on around him? No, and what is true for Lincoln is true for everybody else, great or small. In the case of Lincoln, or you or me, history and biography are two heavily interrelated things. For more about this read the first two chapters of The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills.

I do not think it is too much to say that in these United States, our belief in hard work leading to success is what is best about us and worst about us. It’s a double edged sword. Why is this also the worst thing about us? Because it leads to a misunderstanding of social inequality and all its evils. This is why we treat homeless persons worse than convicts; the crime of personal economic failure is punished more harshly than most crimes against society—you’re out on the filthy streets! Many of you will also correctly point out that many or perhaps most of the homeless suffer from mental illness. Belief in success through hard work is not new and nor is it always bad, in fact it can be very positive and productive. Human beings work hard, we always have and we know those crops are not going to be planted and harvested by themselves. But I do not think any system other than the capitalism that our history has lead to has placed—as a folk, or urban belief, anyway—individual effort as the bottom line when it comes to class status. It has taken the place of God, as in God has ordained this social order as it was believed in the Middle Ages. Since most people under capitalism believe that it is fair, they too must have a belief that some guiding force—rewards for hard work—calls the shots. But while this is often true, many persons view material success uncritically. For examples, look to the popularity of television shows such as The Apprentice and Beverly Hills Housewives or even the horror that is Duck Dynasty.

Lastly, in the context of ‘hard work’ and ‘earning’ I want to remind us all of the working poor in the U.S.A. and throughout the world. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights “…in 2011, the US Department of Labor reported at least 10 million people worked and were still below the unrealistic official US poverty line” (Found at http://ccrjustice.org/working-and-poor-usa). At least 10 million who work and who are still poor. If we try to imagine what these “working poor” jobs are, most of them would require very hard work and are none too glamorous, to say the least.

In these last posts I have attempted to give us something to think about in terms of what we are able to earn. You may have ‘built that’ but the fact that you could has everything to do with when (and where) you were born, over which you had no control. Again, I do NOT say that all that you have earned is just an illusion, and it is possible to genuinely earn something, but you had better get it straight that it is not you alone when it comes to anything having to do with the socioeconomic system and its history. Getting this fact straight has everything to do with establishing a real democratic socialism in which you truly love your neighbor as you love yourself, and you should love both. In a later post we may also talk of the genetic lottery (one’s inherent talents, looks, intelligence, etc.), also a roll of the dice that you had nothing to do with.