What's Goin' On?
11 Apr 2013, 8:23 pm
At the risk of saturating PPR, I decided that there was another subject I wanted to talk about. Sue me.
I have argued, on here and elsewhere, in favor of the traditional Capitalist system. I understand the theory, and I understand that Marxism isn't an option. After all, when you try try try the same experiment again and again and get the same result, it is statistically significant that Marxism produces a totalitarian, economically poor police state. I've read Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital, I've read about the Austrian school and the Keynesian school, and so on and so forth. That's what I've read. But there's also what I see everyday.
I live in a very small town. We have a gas station, we have a liquor store, we have a pizza place and a subway. We used to have another gas station and two bars, but one bar burned down, and the other one and the second filling station shuttered (They were actually sold to "businessmen" that wanted to reopen the bar as a restaurant and take over the gas station. Been two years, and there's still plywood over the windows.). We have a population of 2,000. Almost all of those are American citizens. About a third are young and can work, and want to work. See, I used to be the assistant manager at the remaining gas station until a few months ago. As a result, I know just about everyone who lives near the town center or moves through on a regular basis. I've talked with these people, I've drank with these people, I've gone shooting with a few of 'em, and smoked pot with more than a few. They're good people, and given a chance, they work their butts off. It's alright for the older folks. The oldsters have the cash and the jobs. There's a lot of Federal workers around, being in Central MD and all. They ones who aren't have their own business or work a state jobs like the highways.
As a result, we're considered one of the wealthiest counties in the US, and rents reflect that. I had to move halfway across the state when I was on my own to find a $$#%hole apartment in a %$#^ty part of town that was less than $1800 a month for a two bedroom. I was working fulltime, as was my roommate, and we could barely afford the $1000 a month for the place we found. We ate a lot of ramen. But we made it. By the end of our second year, however, rent was $1200 and more than we could reasonably afford and we were forced to look elsewhere. I moved back in with my family, my roommate ended up in what basically amounts to a boarding house, since his family was in Montana and in their town, there's no work to speak of.
My town was a nice place, and you could survive here. You used to be able to find work at one of the farms, or you could go down the shops, or run over to the next town... You could make it. The only place that still seems to employ Americans is the liquor store, and he's had the same staff for years, no new hires. The Pizza shop and the Gas station used to be pretty reliable, but the pizza shop got bought out by a Palestinian guy who runs it with just his family, and the Gas station, not long after I left, lost all but one of it's American workers and has replaced it with a Salvadoran bunch, most of whom are related. The Palestinian guy lives in Frederick, almost an hour away, and the latinos live in Laurel, about 45 minutes. The Subway has been run by a group of Nepalese immigrants from Baltimore since the big bang. The farms have all gone and been replaced with $500K McMansions for the Feds. A lot of the remaining jobs in the surrounding area are filled by our parents, who have union protection and will never get fired, and are more inclined to downsize than hire, as odd as it is to hope for someone you know to get %$#^canned.
This has basically created a mini-depression for everyone under 30. Those of us with some range head to the nearby cities, those who don't, students, or kids like one old friend whose family is too poor to afford more than one car so he can only travel intermittantly, basically sit around and smoke lots of pot. Sometimes they carpool to the bar. Everyone lives with their families, because rents have gotten too damn high. We'd go elsewhere if we could, but rents are just as high through most of Maryland, and where they aren't there ain't that many jobs anyway. I'm the lucky one. I have saved enough money through nearly a decade of work to afford community college, and have gotten good enough grades that Fafsa supports me enough that my family can afford a four year. Most kids around here won't experience that or have that opportunity.
In the early nineties, when my family first moved out here, it was a quiet, small town with enough work nearby to make us moderately wealthy. But with immigrants coming here from an hour away, becoming managers, and hiring other immigrants instead of local kids, and with the floods of Federal workers who discovered this nice quiet town, and determined that they had to move here, and turn it into anything but. Even the fun things to do, which was to haul up to the old sanitarium and hang out, or to go to the river and swing on this rope we tied around a tree have become non-options. See, some kids were smoking pot in the sanitarium, and graffiti-ing it up, and it wasn't terribly safe, so it has to go. That rope swing is "unsafe", according to our new neighbors, so that's gone too. They cops now sit at both the sanitarium and the river and hassle kids who go up there.
I don't really have a point to all this. It isn't left-brained, it's emotional. My home is dying. This is mostly a scream of frustration. I'm out if my college application gets accepted. But so many of my friends, good kids who want nothing more than what their daddies had, are left jobless, funless, and second-class. I have to watch as my hometown is turned into a white trash town. One side is mansions, the other is double wides, and people in the middle have been selling like crazy and moving into double wides. The cost of gas has gone up, so have smokes, so has beer, so has food, so has property tax and rent. Wages haven't. How can my generation survive this crap?
In the spirit of inviting discussion and referencing my intro, I understand the logic that free trade is great. Free trade is good for the Mexican, and the Chinese. Free trade stops wars. Free trade has made rich people very much richer. How about we talk about the common man? How about the guy who's making payments on the trailer that he moved into after he lost his house and still can't hack it because some Mexican or Nepalese took his job, and blocked his kids out? What about the working poor who have to keep moving because rich %$&*s decide they want to move to their town and jack up property values and close off their river? If Capitalism is so good for everyone, where the hell is our cut down here? The boys down in DC clap themselves on the back when "jobs" jump 0.01%. When are they gonna start realizing that we need not just jobs, but quality jobs, that earn a living wage? I see Republicans and Democrats arguing about crap that doesn't help us and celebrating when some statistic changes that also doesn't help us. Why?
