But I'm not everybody, and everybody is not me.
And everybody who it's not working for is not necessarily lazy or stupid or a dupe of some Socialist conspiracy. And everyone who the system IS working for doesn't necessarily congratulate themselves for their superior intelligence and virtue and treat everyone else with contempt. Some people are humble enough to know when they're lucky.

I just don't feel the necessity for dismissing out of hand every effort, every idea that might help people; that every plan or regulation or law that might bring relief to those who are slowly drowning through no fault of their own be dismissed out of hand because it might inconvenience a handful of plutocrats.

For starters, maybe doubling the minimum wage might have negative consequences, but why is it every single effort to raise the minimum wage even a trifle, or to extend to others, is resisted and subverted and attacked? What's wrong with pegging the minimum wage to the inflation rate? Just for starters. What's wrong with using the minimum wage as a means of communicating to business that if their good or service can't be produced without exploiting workers then maybe nobody really needs that good or service? We're all better off without it. And certainly, no one should be getting rich by producing it at slave wages.

There is nothing wrong with capitalism. It harnesses the desire of people to work and take risks, rewards innovation, exploits people's desire to improve their lives. And it is efficient and self-regulating. I'm not opposed to capitalism. I don't seek to destroy it.

But that doesn't mean capitalism can't be abused or free markets perverted, in fact, it is inherently unstable. No businessman wants stiff competition or a truly free market, especially a competitive labor market. The system can be gamed, the rules can be rigged to favor certain players at the expense of others, and most insidiously, those who are most successful at it have the resources to rig the rules, by either economies of scale, by bribing politicians, fiddling with the tax code and the interest rates, or by just watering down the milk and tampering with the scales. And of course, the big bad unions are the villains of the piece. The weaker unions get and the fewer people belong to them, the more corporate profits rise and real wages fall, and the more the unions get blamed for the fact real wages are falling.

Hell, even Adam Smith observed that you can't put two merchants in a room together without them getting together to rig prices. And if they had their way, we'd turn the clock back a century, when even 7 year olds could seek opportunity in mines and mills, and where people worked 14 hours a day, 6 days a week in deplorable conditions for a daily wage that wouldn't pay for a humble restaurant meal.

Those of you who fancy yourself dynamic, entrepreneurial types above all that are about to learn a very bitter lesson. More and more of the middle class are starting to find out that in spite of their upper class pretensions and aspirations, they are no longer useful. They are surplus people. They, or their kids, can kiss that cushy ofice job goodbye, and they aren't heading to an honest factory or tradesman's job, either. They are heading for the kind of soul-killing, mind numbing toil that this economy can't do with machines, or immigrants, or by shipping the work overseas.

Oh, hell. Why do I bother?