[lbo-talk] cushy life

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Tue Jan 18 11:45:22 PST 2005


Justin:
> In my bourgeois way I always say that there is nothing
> wrong with a middle class life style, it should be
> more widely shared by the poor . . . and the rich.

That would be a disaster. The US life style is not sustainable on a larger scale, especially in more densely populated areas. It can only exist for a small number of people in sparsely populated areas, such as the US.

If the working class of Third World that toils to make the junk sold to the US were to enjoy the life style of the US bourgeoisie - the world would be one big gridlock cum environmental catastrophe.

The key here is not the income and volume of stuff it can buy but efficiency. A lion share of US incomes is wasted on artificially inflated "transaction costs" - endless middlemen providing insurance, selling and financing real estates, and reducing various forms of information asymmetries (from filing taxes, to providing legal advice, and to personal counseling), an army of service persons serving the monumentally inefficient transportation, and army of lawyers litigating every aspect of everyday life, and so on.

It is, however, possible to maintain a life whose quality is superior to that in the US on a fraction of the US cost i.e. income. All that it takes is reducing the transaction costs built into the American monopoly capitalism.

Wojtek



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