House of Eratosthenes

I’m past the halfway point to my dirt nap, I think; and, to date, not a single soul has been able to provide me with a sufficiently edifying and sensible definition of the cliche that is the title of this post.

And when you think of the policies whose virtues are supposed to rest on an agreed-upon definition of this phrase, that’s more than a bit odd isn’t it?

This gets into Aristotle-Basic-Laws-of-Thought stuff…specifically, the Law of the Excluded Middle — shorter form, “Either/Or.” Indeed, with the benefit of the insight gained from the years that are in my wake, I have seen very little evidence of any pair of waterlines that would have to exist in order to define a “middle.” Instead, I see a greater and greater accumulation of evidence that there is only one such waterline — which would have to mean there is only “rich” and “poor,” with no real middle to be seen. So the laws-of-thought say no middle…and, again, life’s experiences say the same.

In history, the notion of a Middle Class seems to have come about when people began to enjoy comfort and stability without having been born into it by virtue of pedigree. Or by inventing some new industry and becoming the captain of it. When people could start clocking-in and clocking-out, putting in an honest day’s work, repeat it for a few decades and live like a King. Relative to their parents and grandparents, I mean…once that became possible we had a “middle class.”

I think when you examine a specific household; like, for example, when a politician is addressing a single constituent, or a bunch of constituents who all occupy the same bracket; then, and only then, we have a good definition for “middle class” because then, and only then, we have a good definition for the two waterlines. The lower waterline separates dependency classes from non-dependent classes. You are not lower-class, because you don’t have to wait in a soup line, or depend on AFDC benefits, or OSI payments, or “welfare cheese,” or whatever. You depend on paychecks, which you earn, at least in theory. Even if you’re a public sector pencil-pusher in some job that would never exist in a company run by sane people, you’re still drawing a check. And it has the look and feel of a free market. So you aren’t lower-class.

For the high water mark, the definition is even clearer: Whatever you make. Anyone who has a higher income than that, is “upper class.” Rich. Never feel sorry for the rich. They’re evil. They didn’t work for their money. It doesn’t belong to them, or it shouldn’t anyway.

Left to my own devices, which is regrettable, that is the best answer to the question I can produce. “Poor” is anybody who relies on alms — “rich” is whoever makes more than me. Or you. Or whoever is being addressed the politician who uses this term. “Middle class” is whatever is in between those two.

If you consult Wikipedia you’ll find an exhaustive list of historical attempts to define this term. None of them work better than mine.

An interesting aspect I’ve noticed about the middle class, over the years, according to the people who are so enthused about using this term: It is one of the few elements within a free market, whose fortunes rise and fall in direct, as opposed to inverse, proportion with its population. Normally, when you sell something you prosper if there are many buyers & few sellers, and when you buy something it’s helpful to you when there are many sellers and few buyers. But if the middle class dwindles, we’re all supposed to be in a world of hurt. Nobody’s been able to explain this to me, either. The middle class is supposed to be big, robust, dense and fat. “Everybody wins” when that happens. Eh, I dunno…that sounds suspiciously like lots of votes that benefit just the politician, to me.

That’s the only part I can see. If your plan is to take lots of money away from anyone who makes more than $50,000 a year, you’d want lots and lots of people to make $40,000 a year. But who else would that help besides politicians like you? Anybody?

How does that old, Reagan-era cliche go. “The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the middle class gets squeezed out.” Squeezed out? What the hell is that supposed to mean? People are working hard, acquiring new skills, changing jobs, earning promotions…so there aren’t as many people left making $40k a year? The people who now make $60k need to go back to making $40k, so the people who make $40k can feel better about themselves?

Now we’re heading straight into a crabs in a bucket mentality.

No — not heading into. That’s where it all started. Really? Am I really saying “middle class” is just code word for “I want everyone to be comfortable and secure…but I don’t want too many people making more than me”? Am I really saying that when politicians start talking about the importance of a “robust, vibrant middle class,” that they’re pandering to this crowd?

Um, actually yeah. Yes, that’s precisely what I’m saying.

Once again: Fundamental laws of thought, coincide with the experience of life. That means something.

“For the high water mark, the definition is even clearer: Whatever you make. Anyone who has a higher income than that, is ‘upper class.’ Rich.”

I like this because it neatly overlaps with a witticism I came up with a while ago:

“Everybody thinks he or she pays too much tax, and other people aren’t paying their fair share. But if you’re a capitalist, ‘other people’ means those making less than you. If you’re a socialist, ‘other people’ means those making more.”
- Stephen J. | 10/01/2010 @ 17:25
I believe the term “middle class” may have originated sometime shortly after the year 1000, during the medieval period in Europe. It’s a time during which town life was reviving and humanity was slowly emerging from the Dark Ages, a centuries-long period brought on by the fall of Rome.

During this time, Europe started seeing the appearance of traveling merchants – people who bought and sold in such a way as to earn a profit doing so. Businessmen, craftsmen and artisans, in other words. They weren’t peasant subsistence farmers, and they weren’t powerful members of the nobility or elite churchmen. They were….in the middle. Neither poor nor rich. You might equate them today with office workers, small business owners, or skilled blue-collar tradesmen & craftsmen (not to be confused with unskilled laborers).

Somewhere along the way, in Western countries the middle class became at least as large as the upper and lower put together, population-wise. It’s never been truer than in the United States – unlike Third World countries, we don’t consist of a huge peasant class controlled by a small wealthy elite with very few in-between; western civilization left that model behind a thousand years ago.

Wordy yes, but I think a bit more precise than simply saying, “‘Poor’ is anybody who relies on alms — ‘rich’ is whoever makes more than me.” By that definition EVERYONE would be ‘middle class’ when that clearly isn’t the case.

The biggest problem, however, arises not in defining the lower or middle classes, but in defining the upper one. Those “rich people” are the ones that the Democrats always want to sock it to; we’re supposed to imagine John Kerry and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Michael Jordan and Sylvester Stallone and George Clooney and Rupert Murdoch tooling around on a 700-foot yacht; lost in all the class-warfare rhetoric is a lot of only sort-of rich who pull down 250k/year or so, and then while at the helm of some small business who spends a lot of that income on salaries, inventory replacement, and capital goods.

If I could wave a wand, I’d force every socialist in America to admit that the super-elite-rich have offshore banks and really sharp accountants to protect their money. While trying to squeeze those people, the Democrats trample underfoot a lot of very hard-working people who employ a lot of other hard-working people. Then when the economy tanks and deficits explode (due in part to falling tax revenue) they blame it all on conservatives, who are supposedly in-bed with Wall Street and Big Whatever.
- cylarz | 10/02/2010 @ 23:13
By that definition EVERYONE would be ‘middle class’ when that clearly isn’t the case.

That’s exactly the point of it, though. When it comes time for them to tell us what they’re going to do, everybody and his dog is middle class…or poor. When it comes time for them to look around and figure out what to tax, suddenly everybody’s rich.

And so you’re left with all these bewildered Obama voters staggering around, going “Hey! How come my taxes are going up? I thought they were going to go taxing those other guys!” And the politicians they got suckered into voting for, reply “oh, that’s a Republican tax increase.” Then laugh their asses off…and why shouldn’t they?

The term is so elastic, there’s no reason to use it unless you’re lying to people.
- mkfreeberg | 10/03/2010 @ 08:45

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“Middle Class”Friday, October 1st, 2010

“Middle Class”
Friday, October 1st, 2010