Meet Me In St. Louis
By L. Neil Smith
[email protected]
Exclusive to The Libertarian Enterprise
Sometime soon,
I want you to do something for me -- and for
yourself.
Click on: http://www.zianet.com/jjohnson/stlouis.htm
I want you to
go someplace that rents classic films and check out
Meet Me in St. Louis, a swell old MGM musical with Judy Garland,
Leon Ames, Mary Astor, Marjorie Main, and I don't know who-all, about
an ordinary family at the turn of the century who happen to live in
St. Louis, Missouri, when the 1904 World's Fair is about open.
Click on: http://www.filmsite.org/meetm.html
It's a pretty good
flick; you may want to watch it the first time
just for the color and the music, the pretty songs and the prettier
dresses. The story concerns a chance the father has to advance
himself by moving his family to New York. Trouble is, they don't
want to move (and you don't want them to) and leave their hometown
-- the daughters their suitors, and the sons their various enterprises
-- and they especially don't want to leave the fine old house they
grew up in, which is practically the star of the movie.
My favorite is
little Margaret O'Brien, baby of the family, when
she goes trick-or-treating for the first time, but I'm a daddy, and a
natural-born mark for that sort of stuff.
Click on: http://www.lneilsmith.org/stlouis.jpg
The second time
through, take a good look at that house. It's the
reason I'm writing this. You see a lot of it and it has a lot to say,
more to Americans of the 1990s, I think, a century after the time of
the movie, than to those of the late 1940s when the movie was made.
To them, it was the kind of house they'd grown up in, too. If our
families made it through the Depression, it's the kind of house lived
in by our grandparents or great-grandparents, whom we went to visit.
It's a great,
big, sprawly house, wide and deep, decorated in
Victorian gingerbread, three stories tall, with a huge wraparound
porch and splendid cupolas and gables. At a guess, I'd say eight
bedrooms, a front parlor, some kind of family or music room, a dining
room, study or library, and a kitchen the size of a basketball court.
Upstairs, in
addition to bedrooms, there'd be box rooms and other
storage, and far below, about an acre of wonderful scary basement.
ut back, facilities of the homely sort, a carriage house cum horse
barn, maybe a workshop. In those days, it wouldn't have been unusual
to find a chickenhouse right in the middle of town.
It's beyond
my purpose here to discuss the fact that the doors of
this house in 1904 -- or in 1944, when the movie was made -- would
never have been locked. By now, most of us know why, don't we? One
of the few positive signs of our times is that the American productive
class is finding out all over again, too.
Hollywood
sometimes overglamorizes the circumstances of its
characters. Our Hero gets off the barrroom planking after a
knockdown, dragout brannigan, and his coiffure is still neat and tidy.
Writers in the movies all live in penthouses and wear dressing gowns
and ascots in the middle of the day. (I wonder where I put my ascot?
My dressing gown is a bathrobe my wife made for me out of camouflage
material. That'll give you an idea where our militia plays its
wargames.)
But as usual, I digress.
I don't
think Hollywood exaggerated much with the house in Meet
Me in St. Louis. They were trying to generate an ambience with it
which would have been lost otherwise. I'm fifty-one years old; I
remember houses like that. My grandmother lived in one that's still
standing a few blocks from where I'm writing this. She was a war
widow (World War I) who raised three children all by herself. It
wasn't a rich family.
The father
of the story, played by that quintessential Victorian
papa, Leon Ames, is an attorney, but it's important to remember that
lawyers in the 1940s weren't as numerous and dominant as they are now,
nor did they earn as much, compared with the general population. They
were even less important in 1904. This isn't a rich family, either.
It's a big
family, though; I don't recall how many boys and girls.
Nor do I recall how many servants. A cook, I think, whom they
couldn't afford to take with them to New York. Yes, and Grandpa the
Civil War veteran (likely the main reason the doors never needed
locking) lived with them, too.
The question
is, how could a productive-class family of 1904
afford the kind of home that gets broken up into apartments today, or
reserved for cutesy office space or the families of millionaires?
Hasn't there been any progress in the last century? Aren't we a
wealthier nation now?
As Tonto
observed to the Lone Ranger at the start of the Indian
attack, it depends on who you mean by "we". I know individuals, some
of whom consciously realize they're Marxists and some who don't, who'd
argue that the ill-gotten, hoarded wealth of Leon and his family has
been redistributed to deserving workers over the past century, and
that the way we're all compelled to live represents progress, and more
social justice than was manifest in 1904.
I'd argue
back that there seem to be more poor people now. That,
if this famous redistribution really occurred, it doesn't seem to have
helped much. I'd rather walk naked through the poorest section of St.
Louis in 1904, than fully armed in the South Bronx or Denver's Five
Points today. And so would you. And so would every member of the
parlor politburo I'm pretending to argue with, here.
Somebody
else might argue that we've chosen to put our money into
things that weren't available in 1904, like the Subaru wagon parked
outside my window, the Compaq computer I'm writing on, the Fisher
stereo I'm listening to, the 27" Sony my daughter's watching in the
other room, or the Kenmore washer and dryer in the basement.
I'd argue
back that, in terms of real wealth, Leon's horse and
carriage represented a bigger investment to his family than our car
does to us. My computer cost a mere fraction of what a typewriting
machine did then (I once owned a typewriter from that period, a marvel
of fragility and unnecessary complication). My stereo and TV are
cheaper than their Victrola and piano (in those days the major centers
of home entertainment). And even our washer and drier are less
expensive to obtain and operate than their washtub, woodstove,
washboard, wringer, and clotheslines.
All of
this before we get to important questions about labor:
who fed and groomed the horse; who made perfect copies of typescripts
(and what a pain in the ass that was); who wound the Victrola and
played the piano; what poor soul drug dirty clothes, soaked in hot,
soapy water, across that washboard again and again, poured the water
out, rinsed them in hot unsoapy water, wrung them out laboriously, and
hung them on the line, praying it wouldn't rain.
In terms
of real wealth, everything is unimaginably cheaper now.
And women have become wage earners right along with men. Most of us
live in cheap little shoeboxes or tin cans. We should all be vastly
wealthier. So the question changes from, why aren't we all living in
great big beautiful houses to, what the hell happened to our money?
Here's a hint ...
Click on: http://www.waco93.com/index.htm
What do
you suppose it cost to confine 80 innocent people in their
church for 51 days, torture them all night with multi-megawatt
searchlights and the amplified sounds of rabbits' throats being cut,
punch holes in their walls with tanks, pump the church full of
poisonous, flammable particulates, set it alight with shoulder-fired
missiles, and when the victims -- two dozen of them little children --
tried to escape, mow them down with machineguns?
It takes
a lot of money to run a police state.
It takes
a lot of money to illegally deprive innocent people of
the free, unrestrained exercise of their unalienable individual,
civil, Constitutional, and human rights, terrorize them, torture them,
beat them up and kill them, even when you steal everything they have
and -- if they live to be acquitted of whatever trumped-up charge you
used to justify your atrocities against them -- refuse to give it
back.
It takes
a lot of money to run a police state.
It takes
half of everything your victims labor eight hours a day
and overtime to earn, half of everything they dare spend on themselves
and the families they hardly ever have enough time with, plus half of
whatever they have left to pay for your "services", which as I say
consist of terrorizing, torturing, beating up, and killing people,
while pretending to help them.
It takes
a lot of money to run a police state.
It takes
so much that seven-eighths of everything is tax.
The average
member of the American productive class winds up
handing over half of what he earns to one government or another in the
form of income, sales, excise, property, "insurance", or other taxes.
Everyone he does business with -- the butcher, the baker, the
candlestick maker -- loses half of everything he makes the same way,
except that he builds his losses into the price of the goods and
services he charges for. Which means that the average member of the
American productive class ends up getting half as much for his work,
and paying twice as much as he should for everything he gets.
For every
dollar he earns, he has to find a way to live on only a
quarter.
It takes
a lot of money to run a police state.
But it gets
worse. On top of being deprived of the fruits of
three quarters of his labor, government regulations imposed on him and
everyone he does business with cost him yet another half of whatever
he thought he had left. The horrible fact is that, out of every
dollar he makes, he may keep only twelve and a half cents!
One eighth
of what he earns.
Because it
takes a lot of money to run a police state.
Americans
are an amazing people. Lately we've been encouraged to
think of our countrymen as lazy, ill-educated, unproductive, stupid,
yet they maintain the wealthiest, most powerful culture on the face of
the earth, the greatest rate of progress and the highest standard of
living history ever witnessed, and they do it all on one-eighth of
what they really earn, while the rest is confiscated and squandered by
the least productive sector of any economy -- politicians -- on
debauchery, depravity, death, and destruction.
Squandered
on bureaucrats to administer welfare programs to people
who wouldn't be poor if the taxes hadn't been collected to begin with.
Squandered on nuclear-powered aircraft carriers to prove that
Americans can be the same international assholes the Macedonians, the
Romans, and the Brits were before us, and the Germans, the Japanese,
and the Russians all tried their best to be but couldn't keep it up.
Squandered on cretins who can't run their own lives intelligently,
courageously, or decently, but who insist on telling us what to eat,
drink, breathe, and think, and now, when we show the least resistance,
terrorize, torture, beat up, and kill us -- and steal our children if
they haven't killed them, too.
Seven eighths
of everything is tax -- because it takes a lot of
money to run a police state -- and we'd all be better off if every
dollar were burned in the town square or poured into the sewer. At
least that way it couldn't be used to do any more harm.
Click on: http://www.lneilsmith.org//lns_tpb-2.html
For more than
twenty years, I've asked people to imagine what
their lives would be like if they could keep the other seven-eighths
of what they earn. Would they buy a big, sprawly frame house, wide
and deep, two stories tall, decorated in Victorian gingerbread, with
eight bedrooms, a front parlor, some kind of family or music room, a
dining room, study or library, a kitchen the size of a basketball
court, a huge wraparound porch, and splendid cupolas and gables?
Or would
they back off, work an hour a day instead of eight to
maintain their current living standard, and spend the rest of their
time making love to their spouse and playing with their children, as
human beings were meant to do since the day we came down from the
trees?
My wife
points out that they could put money away, retire in a few
years to "live on the interest" as people did in England during the
greatest period of progress the world had seen up to then, and spend
their time listening to that Victrola or playing that piano. The
bottom line is, they'd have a choice, of those alternatives, anything
in between, or something else altogether. Of a magnificent home or
world travel or both. Or anything else they might want, that eight
times as much wealth could get for them -- wealth you must remember
that they already earn but which is taken away by the
welfare-warfare police state.
Lately I've
come to realize that they'd have something else, too.
It takes a lot of money to run a police state, money that would be
better spent, more safely and less destructively spent, on eight
bedrooms, a front parlor, a family or music room, a dining room, study
or library, a kitchen the size of a basketball court, splendid cupolas
and gables, and a huge wraparound porch with a big, white, gliding
swing.
It takes
a lot of money to run a police state.
And it's
hard to raise enough to oppress people when you've been
limited -- as government must be if civilization is to survive
another generation -- to a lonely street corner, selling pencils from
a tin cup.
Click on:http://www.lneilsmith.org//lns-pic02.html
L. Neil Smith is the award-winning author of The Probability Broach,
Pallas, Henry Martyn, and Bretta Martyn (published in August
of 1997) and other novels, as well as publisher of The Libertarian
Enterprise, available free by e-mail subscription or very readable at
http://www.webleyweb.com/tle/.
Look for his works at Amazon.com Books, http://www.amazon.com
or give Laissez Faire Books a toll-free call at 1-800-326-0996.
Neil's own site, the "Webley Page" may be found at
http://www.lneilsmith.org//.