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The Dark at the Bottom

Slavery: Not a Black and White Issue

The underclass have few morals, and what few they have are misplaced;

1] Never tell the authorities about any of the wrong-doings of your neighbours.

2] Never ask why you should follow that rule if you know what's good for you.

3] Never have sex with a child, unless you are a child.

The underclass must be eliminated. They are a group without virtues, in every sense of the word. Living as scum cannot be an option. No society can tolerate living alongside a huge group of social parasites.

By eliminating the underclass I mean eliminate the causes of the underclass. The people themselves are victims, but they are also damaged by the system, and because they are damaged they go on to further damage the rest of society. This page has been read and deliberately misquoted to "prove" that I am a Nazi and I want to kill people. That is farcical. I want to destroy the underclass as a class not to kill the people. I want to change the system to eliminate the causes of misery, hopelessness and despair. I want the underclass to stop being the downtrodden damaged and antisocial poor and to become productive citizens with full lives and aspirations that are compatible with a happy and healthy community, society and economy. I don't want them dead, I want them transformed into full people.

The underclass, and even the proletariat, can never be the engine of social change. They never have been, they never will be. The closest to a working class revolution that is ever attained is the politicization of a handful of agitators who claim working class credentials. Most of the great communist leaders of the twentieth century were educated and middle class, including the greatest guerilla leaders ever, Che Guevara and Mao Zedong.

The idea of a working class revolution is ridiculous. Trying to make the proletariat or underclass into the engine of social change and equality is doomed to failure. The underclass need freeing from the desperate straits that capitalist societies put them in, they need to be enabled to become fully rounded people, that means they need to cease to be the proletariat. There is no glory in toil and poverty.

Many people of the left want to eliminate inequality out of some namby-pamby idea that everybody is fundamentally good and deserves to be treated well. I don't. I hate the poor. They are a cancer on our society, bleeding our resources, polluting our urban landscape and threatening our security. I simply see redistribution of wealth and opportunity as a better expedient than gas chambers or neutron bombs. This attitude is not that rare among thinkers of the socialist persuasion, Karl Marx was said to be quite a snob. I look upon the poor as damaged and damaging. I do not want to put them on a pedestal and worship them, I want to change them into better people, for their own good and the good of everybody.

The underclass should be eliminated not for their own good, I don't care about them, but for the good of the rest of society. Please note, I am not being ironic about this, I mean it. I strongly suspect many others on the left think in a similar way but don't have the intellectual honesty to admit it. The poor of today are social cripples, we cannot allow them to pass on their worldview to another generation. We must be quite clear about our task, we must eliminate the underclass, they are an abomination; feckless, hopeless, lacking self-worth, motivation and any common levels of decency. We cannot afford to let them breed another generation of their kind.

If there was no class of poor people then there would be no reason to be a socialist, capitalism is a less than perfect system but it works tolerably well for the top 60% of society. The rest are the scum you ignore socially and who take no positive part in society. I do not see anything good in the culture of the underclass; they are nasty people living nasty lives. I make a distinction between the working class and the underclass. While I do not romanticize working class culture and values, as so many people do, I do respect them.

I want to see a world in which everybody is given a fair chance to make something of themselves. A world in which everybody has got something to lose, a world in which everybody is a stakeholder. At present many people have nothing to lose. They go through generations with no decent jobs, no decent education, no prospect of anything better. If you are born in to such a family and you have got a bit of get-up-and-go about you then being a gang leader is probably the best career path open to you. You gain wealth, respect and access to sex; or put another way, a rewarding life. To go as far in the legitimate world you would have to have more than twice the talent.

We will never be able to destroy the gangs and the crime culture in our societies until we acknowledge the fact that being a gangster is a rational decision. Crime pays, it pays better than work for millions of people across this world. That reality has to be acknowledged before it can be changed.

For thousands of years we have tried to keep the masses in place with religion. It doesn't really work. The poor will develop their own morality quite separate from ours.

I suggest an advance on the problems of the poor from several fronts at the same time:-

1] World Government. This is the key to success of socialism. Don't give the bogeymen of right anywhere to live; eliminate foreigners, foreign competition, tax havens and comparative wealth in one fell swoop.

2] Reduce inequality by diktat. Both cap maximum earnings and institute a guaranteed minimum income.

3] Crack down on crime as harshly as any Sultan or hanging judge.

4] End bans on drugs and prostitution and allow controlled access to gambling.

5] Publish everybody's tax details.

6] End inheritance of wealth and property.

I doubt that anybody could read that list without doing a double-take on at least one suggested measure.

It will not be either necessary or desirable to eliminate the free market. The point of political action is to mitigate the bad effects. No Government can run a whole economy efficiently, the Soviet Union showed that, it left a lot to be desired. On the other hand the grinding poverty and the disenchantment and misery it generates show just as clearly that a capitalist alternative is no Utopia.

There is an important distinction between the free market and the capitalist system. Free markets are natural, they arise spontaneously. In prisons cigarettes, soap or phone cards can become currency. When two societies meet they trade, they have been doing so since the days of the crudest stone tools and maybe even before that. Trade is older than our species. International trade began in prehistoric times. The free market system is as natural to our species as sharing and eating meat or trying to do things a better way.

Capitalism is the system of economics and law that has evolved over the last few centuries. It is not natural or inevitable. The capitalist system includes concepts such as the corporation, limited liability, patents and copyright, transferability of contract obligations, stock markets, options and futures. None of those is inevitable or coded in our DNA. That is the system that has created great wealth and at the same time created the underclass. Modern capitalism is a creation of the interaction between markets and a system of legal frameworks and partial juristictions. It is neither natural nor designed, neither inevitable nor conspiratorial.

The way to succeed is to use free markets as the engine to drive society on but to use political power to steer a better course. Capitalism is the price mechanism raised to become a god, we should see the price mechanism as a force to use for our own ends, like we use the wind to fill sails. A socialist government can use the price mechanism to achieve specific and desirable goals. Regeneration of cities and the reduction of pollution are goals that can be advanced by using market forces.

Taxation is a great power that the Government can use to achieve specific goals. The greatest goal is that of controlling inequality. The super-rich do not deserve the money, nobody deserves a lifestyle like that. By the twin expedient of universal openness in taxation and a 100% marginal taxation rate everybody can see where money goes to. I suggest putting the income ceiling at a comfortable level of around $500,000 per year. That will allow a lot of motivation for most people. Very few people will be caught above the peak. Who can credibly argue that they either need or deserve more than this amount to live on each year? If anybody tried to justify it to me I would laugh in their face. Below that level I propose a single taxation rate. Everybody should pay tax at the same rate between a lower Government pledged minimum income level and the income cap. I have never understood the justification for a progressive tax regime. As for the rate of tax, when it is universal and unavoidable the actual rate will be much less of a political hot potato than before.

What would happen to those people who currently "earn" more than $500,000 per year? How are we nasty taxmen going to treat them? Just consider, we the people are all tax demanders as well as tax payers, the Government is just as much US as it is THEM. What will the hard done by rich do?

First of all they wouldn't bother to claim the income anymore. At the moment the top players in major televised sports, for example, claim that their talent generates enormous amounts of money, which in a sense is true, and that it rightly belongs to them, which it doesn't. If they were faced with an income cap of $500,000 they would have no reason to claim more than this. The money would remain in their club or in the events that collect it until it leeched out to some other source, or was sourced out to some other leech; whatever. An interesting consequence might be that only second rate basketball or soccer players would endorse shoes, the best would have their $500,000 as wages and wouldn't be able to ask for more from other sources, unless of course they did it because they actually believed in the product. Don't laugh, some of them might; David Beckham strikes me as shallow enough to do it.

Top company directors would claim their maximum salary and large amounts of extra non-monetary benefits then the rest of what they currently pocket would go in favours to other people or more luxurious fittings in the executive washroom, or corporate sponsorship of worthy causes. Or it would not be generated at all, if the top people cannot benefit from more corporate profit they might as well pay higher wages to the staff or charge less for the products. Most likely they would spend the money in ways to flatter their egos through charity donations and high visibility scientific research. Top businessmen do not do it for the money anyway, the money is just the way the score is marked up in the game they play to win.

With total disclosure of tax details and a worldwide income cap there would be no point in being super-rich. If you try to cheat the system you will be caught out, there will be millions who resent your wealth who will ensure you do not get away with it. Anybody driving an expensive car or sailing anything but the most modest yacht will instantly attract the attention of every tax inspector and investigative journalist. Why bother being a plutocrat or a gangster if you cannot enjoy it? People will find other things to measure their worth against. Men who cannot leave material wealth to their sons will instead leave a legacy of education and philanthropy. Men will not make a name for themselves by their wealth, but by their lives.

Some people will argue that if you remove the incentive for the rich then they would not work. These people are usually the ones who also claim we must remove benefits from the poor in order to make them want to work. Making people poor makes them work, making other people rich makes them work. It is a strange world we live in.

The idea that clever and resourceful people would not be clever or resourceful if they were not allowed to become fabulously rich is absurd. I am not suggesting that there should be no inequality of income or lifestyle, only that a sensible ceiling be put in. People would want to reach that ceiling and then they would move on to other aims and goals.

If fabulous wealth is supposedly required in order for anything decent to be produced just show me who is rich and then tell me what they have contributed to the world. The obscenely rich of this world are often corporate raiders and the like. They make money out of money. They take the work of other people and companies and convert it into another form. The wealth of our society is generated by scientists and engineers, technicians, market researchers, salesmen, machine operatives and labourers. Everybody who works contributes to the wealth of society not just the handful of tycoons and superstars who become obscenely rich.

If it wasn't for the fabulous wealth to be generated nobody would develop an operating system for all the world's computers to run on or launch a new airline company. Is that what you expect us to believe? I also suppose you think we should believe that nobody would want to play in the world's best football or basketball teams either unless they were paid four hundred times more money than a sewer worker. That idea is obviously absurd. People pocket the money when they can, but people will still want to do exciting and glamorous things in business even if they only get the same money as everybody else. What would you choose as a job, for the same income; chief executive officer or lavatory cleaner? Money does not make the world go round. People work for glory, power, status, respect, and money to live on.

The underclass must be destroyed by the most powerful weapon available to cure crime; hope.

Education is a way out for many. It Britain in 1944 there was an Act of Parliament that did more to destroy the class system than any other. The Education Act of 1944 gave a way out of the gutter for millions of the children of the poor. My father was a beneficiary. The son of a tenant farmer, he gained a decent education at a Grammar School that allowed him to rise up in his career as a police officer. Many others rose up out of humble and even deprived backgrounds to become big players in politics, business and the media. The grammar schools didn't teach grammar, you learn that before the age of five, they taught self discipline, self respect and a desire to succeed. They were selective. They selected on "intelligence", or at least aptitude in scoring well in IQ tests.

Selective schools took those marked out as potential academic high fliers and helped them to fly. The other side of the coin was the secondary modern school. Just as making cream involves generating large amounts of skimmed milk, the Secondary Modern schools took the rejects and kept them out of trouble until it was time for them to enter the factories and mines. The media in this country is for ever going on about the grammar school system, the reality was that most children ended up at the second rate secondary schools. So did I. At the age of 12 I moved house, I had the choice to sit the entrance exam for the grammar school or just go to the secondary school. I wonder what my life would have been like if I took that test? Would I have passed? I was a late developer, maybe not. Whenever MENSA publishes little tests in the newspaper I get a pass mark, I score well on the Word Power tests in the Readers Digest, but would I have the courage to pass the ultimate make or break test? My mother decided I shouldn't take it.

Education is certainly one way to break the underclass. But it cannot be the only way. Taking away the brightest minds out of the ghettos is worth doing, even if they end up having less than perfect lives, it is better than leaving them to be the intelligentsia of the criminal world. It does little for the majority. It is not possible for any education system to find a way out for everybody; make these six into businessmen, this one a ballerina, this one a violinist, these two can be boxers, this one an Army officer, these three can be footballers, these five can be teachers, these two can be lawyers, this one a TV presenter, and errr.... these 150,000? In a world of more than 6 billion people most people are nobodies, and cannot ever be anything else. Education is a dead end.

Suggesting education as the cure to inequality is almost as naive as suggesting that a lottery will cure the problem.

A good society must allow everybody to develop to their full useful potential. Education is justified by this alone. Education cannot solve inequality. Opportunities must be opened up for all people at all levels of skill and talent. It has to be recognized that most people in a world as big as ours will never shine and be the best at anything; we cannot have 6 billion events in which we can all win one gold medal. So we must find other ways in which to make their lives fulfilling.

Inequality can only be tackled head-on. We must destroy the ghettos. Social engineering. Find new places for the people to live, move them to new cities and even to new continents, give them a fresh start. Australia was built from the scum of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, but the white Australians today are just as socially, medically and intellectually fit as the societies they left behind. Give people a decent environment in which to live, you will get decent people.

I also suggest a more radical approach, stealing the children of criminals. If you are born with genes of the poor and the criminal and are left in the environment of the poor and criminal is it surprising if you turn into a criminal? I do not believe that children are born criminal. I suggest all the children, born or yet to be born, of any person convicted of a second felony should be taken into the care of the state and adopted by childless couples who can offer a stable home background. This is worth doing for the good of the children as well as the deterrent effect on the parents. It may deter the criminally inclined from being criminal or it may deter the hardened criminal from having children, either way everyone's a winner. If my hunch about crime not being in the genes is wrong then this policy will show it, and show that sterilization of the criminally inclined and preventative custody of their children is required instead. Moderation in the defence of society is no virtue.

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© 1999 - 2009 by Martin Willett.

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