Rents are the bourgeoisie’s way of “double-dipping”, ie, extracting additional surplus value they can’t get on their first pass (ie, via their ownership of the means of production and distribution of real goods and services). Because the rates of profits on real goods and services are subject to inexorable downward pressures due to competition (among other factors), but the appetites of the bourgeoisie who own the means of production of those goods and services do not diminish in tandem with those profits, the former naturally look for other ways to prop their total returns up.

A lot of people dream of “being their own boss”, starting a modest business, “making a separate peace” with capitalism-blood-red-in-tooth-and-claw, as it were. If that’s you, I hate to break it to you, but… You need more than “smarts” to secure a living wage under capitalism. You need a convergence of conditions which capitalism tends to make increasingly scarce. Watch this video and others by David Harvey and other Marxist thinkers, and you will start to see more of the problem.

“Meritocracy” is the original bourgeois sin. Those who expect to be differentially “rewarded” with greater power and status over others, on the basis of “hard work” or “accomplishments”, already vitiate the work they do itself. If the major motivation for someone’s work does not flow from pride and enjoyment in the work itself, or in their contributions to the wellbeing of others, but only primarily in an urge to lord it over their fellows, the work itself must be considered suspect.

Our society dedicates monumental and inordinate efforts to combating hypothetical, phantom problems that are scarcely ever in evidence, while studiously ignoring burning fires right under our noses – literally. Take inequality. The evidence for the toll taken by extreme inequality is everywhere, but our society dedicates its energies to fighting the supposed dangers of “too much equality”, on the theory that, otherwise, we might run afoul of the danger of “producing too little” by not sufficiently “incentivizing hard work”.

The more prominent the arguments for a “no” vote are in an election – ie, the more dominant the arguments are in the negative or in opposition to a candidate, ballot measure, or program, in contrast to POSITIVE arguments promoting something, whether a candidate, a measure, or a program – the stronger the correlation with low voter turnout, as supported, again, by abundant election experience and statistics. This experience spans countries and has been masterfully employed in elections around the world, even by dictators!

It’s amazing how the mettle of human character miraculously and precipitously deteriorates so coincidentally whenever and wherever the rents skyrocket! It’s almost as if land is a finite resource that God isn’t making more of. Almost as if druggies who discreetly shoot up behind closed doors when they can afford the rents wind up shooting up outdoors when they no longer can. Almost as if wages don’t rise by double digit percentage points year over year even though rents and mortgages do.

In my last post, I asserted that “the rich are moral imbeciles”. But a far more consequential assertion, and one that really ultimately requires far more documentation and extended argumentation, is that their overall ideological and practical project depends crucially on reducing the rest of us to their own debased level. I don’t know how many book length investigations there are of this reality, but it could be said that the entire “neoliberal” order consists of an unending demonstration of it.

In a society such as that of the United States, the overwhelming majority of the rich are moral imbeciles. I am not engaging in hyperbole now, or expressing sour grapes, envy, or mere moral indignation, but observing a simple, prosaic matter of fact. And I should not have to engage in ten minutes of apologies and asides to the effect of “not all rich people…” to justify my meaning here. It should instead be self-evident in a society as simultaneously enormously materially wealthy as the United States and yet so seemingly incapable of organizing the most rudimentary social provisions for its population.

The bourgeoisie (aka, “capitalist class”), are a tiny minority of society (between one and ten percent, depending on how you count the intermediate “coordinators” or “professional managers”, who may control and manage the assets of the infamous “one percent”, but without directly owning many of them). Nevertheless, they manage to impose a ruthless pecking order on the rest of society, based on supposed “merit”. This serves a double ideological purpose:

It should be counted as an irony of the profoundest importance that the Mont Pèlerin Society (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society ), commonly regarded as the formal birthplace of “neoliberalism” as a distinct ideology or political program, numbered the following two among its six “core principles” (or “Statement of Aims”, as it called it) which it announced at its founding meeting convened in April, 1947: Methods of reestablishing the rule of law and of assuring its development so that individuals and groups are not in a position to encroach upon the freedom of others and private rights are not allowed to become a basis of predatory power.