In Defense of the Working Class
It's not the 1% who are the problem, it's the 20% who despise the working class.
I grew up working class and welfare class.
My stepfather was a postman and my mother was a cleaner.
It was a precarious economic existence built on wages, welfare, and constant debt.
It was a hand-to-mouth and paycheck-to-paycheck existence due to economic conditions such as the high interest rates on mortgages in 1990s, downward pressure on wages due to a preference for contractors over employees, and made worse by parental dysfunction and addiction.
There was no cavalry, no grandparents, no political savior, no social worker there to help us. My parents had burned every bridge with every relative they had due to borrowing money or burning them with vice. There was no prospect of changing your lot except by hard grit, determination, and the discipline of trying to make something better of your life.
It was a cycle of poverty, dysfunction, welfare, addiction, and debt and I was in the maelstrom.
My brother and I got out. I joined the army then become a theologian, he is a successful school teacher. We married women with good upbringings to compensate for our own misfortune and we became decent fathers ourselves. We got out of poverty and made it to the middle class. We were lucky, not everyone is.
This upbringing taught me several things.
Poverty is one kick in the guts after another. Every time you try to crawl out of the hole there’s another bill, another disaster dragging you back in.
Poverty gets worse and is harder to escape if you give yourself over to vice and ill-discipline.
I’m not a Marxist, I truly believe that economic freedom gives you opportunity and profit motive means you can share in the fruits of your own labour. But I know that there are greedy and exploitive people out there who will not hesitate to harvest the working-poor like crops on a farm. The gambling cartels, pawn shops, finance companies, and predatory employers. If we are going to have capitalism, then we need a badass cop with a big stick. Otherwise, a predatory oligarchy will make the poor poorer and the rich richer.
I take to heart the teachings of the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles about looking after the poor. I mean, I resonate James’ denunciation of those who “have spent your years on earth in luxury, satisfying your every desire. You have fattened yourselves for the day of slaughter.” (Jas 5:5).
If I had to say who is the enemy of the poor, it’s not the top 1%, it’s the top 20%.
Who are the top 20%? It is the upper middle class, the bohemian bourgeois, the champagne socialists, who flaunt their luxury left-wing beliefs, which are to the detriment of the working-poor, even while they think of themselves as our betters.
Consider the situation in California where residents of many wealthy and progressive suburbs have objected to the introduction of low-cost affordable housing in their area. They love the cleaning lady who cleans their house, but they don’t want her to be able to afford to live close to where she works. Yet the same person who will notionally be in favor of open borders! It’s somewhere between hypocrisy and stupidity.
It is this bohemian bourgeois who champions views that are the biggest detriment to the working-poor. Let get give a few examples:
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