By Blox Content Management
To the editor: From the beginning of time to the present day, in every human society that has ever existed, there have been only three economic classes: the masters, the slaves and the unnecessary persons.
The masters control all the sources of wealth in a given geopolitical area, and because of this control they live la dolce vita. The slaves have but one reason to live, and that is to keep the rich and powerful masters rich and powerful through a lifetime of working to produce wealth. As for the unnecessary persons, their title says it all. These are the people who aren鈥檛 fortunate enough to be born into a family of masters and whose physical, intellectual and/or mental health situation makes them poor candidates for slavery. Unnecessary persons survive through various combinations of menial work, charity and crime. That is what is referred to as 鈥渢he social order.”
Governments are established by the masters in order to enforce this social order. When the slaves begin to complain about reduced quality of life due to the masters demanding too much of the wealth and openly begin to talk of revolution, or when the unnecessary people won鈥檛 stay hidden in the shadows and begin creating a public nuisance, it is government’s job to act to restore the social order.
America is now in what economists call 鈥渓ate-stage capitalism.” America has consumed most of the natural resources that once made it the wealthiest country on Earth. The masters keep demanding ever more of the dwindling wealth to feed their appetite for bigger yachts, private jets and rockets to Mars. Meanwhile, the slaves are finding it ever harder to pay the mortgage, car loans and health care bills. Thus, you have MAGA. As for telling the unnecessary people to 鈥済et a job,鈥 one can only ask 鈥渨hat job?鈥 There are none, and the situation is only going to get worse when AI is combined with modern robotics.
So, we have a difficult choice: extermination camps for life鈥檚 losers or a post-capitalist collective society. I鈥檓 a collectivist. But given the social order and that it has an unused brownfield site with direct rail access and a nearby mothballed natural gas power plant that could be converted to a crematorium, there is a chance that Pittsfield could enter the history books on the same page as Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka.
Thomas E. King, Dalton