Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

There is no cake. The cake is a lie. What’s more, it always was and it always will be.

Last week I was treated second hand—not first, because I’ve blocked the individual’s delusional ass some time back—to the spectacle of a man 20 years older than I arguing in public that having to work for a living is a bad side effect of capitalism, and that “Wage slavery” is in fact slavery, which only exists because the evil capitalists want to step on the common man.

Holy shades of slither-shitting Jean Jacques Rousseau Batman! That is more actual stupid than should fit in a human cranium. In fact, any human brain crammed with that level of insanity should spontaneously explode creating a crater the size of the pacific ocean.

How is it possible to live over seventy years in the world, to read and write, to be in touch with people of various professions and different avocations, to have traveled and seen the world and still come away convinced of the infantile idea that whatever you wish will materialize because you wish it.

I would like to invite the distinguished idiot to go and lay down under Rousseau’s proverbial apple tree and open his mouth wide, until an apple falls in it and chokes him. Though to be fair, he’s more like to die of exposure, insect bites, or pneumonia. Oh, yeah, or of hunger, unless someone takes pity on his complete and utter insanity and feeds him and takes care of him. Which is what he’s counting on.

What he is counting on is a delusion partaken of by libertarians who subscribe to the voluntarianist brand of insanity: If people just do what they want to do with no compensation, everything will work out in the end. We’ll be rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And blessings and glory will be showered on everyone, without anyone having to do anything to receive them.

That is the cake. The beautiful illusory frosted cake that socialism and communism, and utopian philosophies hold out.

I bet you it was what the serpent whispered in the garden. (I find it hilarious that Rousseau used the apple tree as an example of the all-providing bounty of nature.) “Just do what you please, and the world will take care of you.”

Or as a long ago friend (who I think no longer speaks to me because I had an habit of being rude) used to put it “I worked very hard in other lives. In this life, the universe just wants to take care of me.”

Having watched her progression through life, the universe had many names and many faces. It was relatives, friends and casual acquaintances, and people who thought she was going through temporary inconvenience, which couldn’t possibly be permanent, because who wanted to live like that? …. until eventually it ran out.

We are born naked, mewling and weak, with no ability to stand or feed ourselves, or do pretty much anything. Those of us who survive our first week do so because others work for us.

There are pretty strong bonds and instincts, and impulses pushing us to care for a baby. (I read an article, must be 20 years now that said the cats evolved to mimic the signs of human babies, and the gestalt impression of a baby, which then caused humans to look after them.)

However, unless you’re extremely generous, or morally impelled to do so, no one is going to pick up a baby not their own and look after their every need because they like doing so.

Look, I’ve looked after babies not my own, human and cat and on a singular occasion, a rabbit. I did it because I believe life is precious and worth it. I did not do it because it was enjoyable, and I liked the process.

Looking after babies is bad smelling overflow at both ends, and unending drudgery. You do it for love, and you do it for conviction. No one does it for fun.

“But you see, Sarah, people do that for free.”

I waggle my hand at you. Sort of. In the case of human babies there is usually a non-verbal contract that you look after them and eventually they’ll look after you. But that’s neither here nor there.

This is exactly where these half-cocked lunatics get the idea that someone or something should look after them forever. That they’re entitled to have every need met, as they did when in their cradles.

Hell. In most cultures throughout the world until the Christian era, even babies might not get those needs met. Until people believed that each baby was specially created by the hand of the Most High and therefore precious in and of himself, they stood a good chance of being drowned in the slops pail and taken out with the trash, if the family already had all they wanted or simply was not at home to a baby girl.

The adult-infants shitting in civilization’s cradle and blaming “capitalism” for not getting the pacifier of their preference shoved in their greedy mouths need to grow up.

Until our rich, sassy and frankly stupid era, most people’s working life started at two or three. And before these reticulated imbeciles start talking about capitalism: that is through the extent of humanity as far back as we can tell, back to primitive tribes who had never heard of money; back to isolated communities where money did not apply.

We have letters written by colonials in the US (and btw, anyone who thinks colonialism is white supremacy and “easy” is invited to spend a month—just one—living as these people did) talking of their two, three and four year old children doing tasks that in our day and age we’d be hesitant to entrust to a ten or fifteen year old, from feeding the livestock to caring for cows.

I know in my mom’s day by the time you were five you were looking after your younger siblings, and might be making food (over an open fire) to free your mother to do enough work to keep the family afloat.

Yeah, I know, I know “Capitalism.” My sore ass.

Most of human history, since our species, metaphorically speaking, emerged naked and squalling onto the Earth there hasn’t been enough to go around: Not enough food, not enough time, nor enough strength, not enough covering against the cold, and certainly not enough rest. To keep a family fed, the entire family worked. And it was brutal and relentless work morning to night.

I love the fact that the neo-Rousseauneans, primitive fantasist edition, look at the graves of the neolithic and tell us before agriculture these people lived wild and free. Each did what they wanted. And they had no disease, no–

No life. They died young and often brutally. At 58, I’d look to them like an impossibly ancient human. And not having scars, broken bones, and being relatively well fed, I’d look to them much younger than I am.

Shakespeare is estimated as having died at my age “old and full of years” and btw the Elizabethans were already, compared to the history of the human race, already living high off the hog.

This same idiot, btw, who thinks wage slavery is still slavery also is convinced that humans always lived about as long as they do now. Sure. In some very prosperous pockets. In certain places or classes in the world. It seems that the extent of our genetic longevity is somewhere around 120 if everything goes just right for us. But you know, those last twenty years you’ll be like the infants and depend on the love and kindness of those around you.

For most of human existence upon the Earth, reaching sixty was a fabled dream. Sure, the statistics we have include a lot of infant death, but dear bog, it wasn’t that long ago or faraway that, as a kid in a relatively (and by historic norms astonishingly) well off village in a not barbarous country, when someone died at sixty there was a shrug and a “he was old.” I was 14 before I met my first 80 year old. There simply were none around. (And that 80 year old looked worse than my dad who is now 90.)

Most people died relatively young, of horrible stuff. And remember I was born after the advent of antibiotics (without which I wouldn’t be here and writing this at you. In that universe I died somewhere around 6 of tuberculosis.)

Sure. “Everyone does what they want, and we will all be provided for.” We have it now. Or we did, before these mind-wiped gapeseeds came onto the landscape. It’s called free trade and a money economy.

Heck, it might be the greatest invention of the human mind.

Look, as anyone who has lived in a commune, or even gone on vacation with a handful of close friends knows, there are always people ready to eat. There might even be enough to cook (for a definition of cook) but no one ever wants to wash the dishes.

In the same way, while I know people who dig ditches (or furrows) for fun, or who enjoy fixing cars, I don’t know a single human being who cleans septic tanks for a lark, or who irons clothes for eight hours a day, or who–

Hell, even the things that are fun—I confess to a weird love for painting and fixing furniture—aren’t fun if you do them day in, day out, eight to ten hours a day. Look, I love writing. And I’m lucky enough to make enough from it that it constitutes “making a living.” It’s not a great living, mind you. And it’s insecure. Most years I make somewhere between 30 and 50k. I don’t remember what letter that makes me in the Correia author alphabet. But there is always a year or two, often when we can least afford it, that I make 10k. Or 5k. Or a few years ago 2k. So without a husband who has a regular income, I’d be in serious trouble.

Ah, but that’s the inherent issue of the capitalist system, idiots would bleat. I should have everything I want to live, and then if I felt like writing, I would.

There are only two problems with this: I might not feel like writing anything others wanted to read; and I certainly wouldn’t do it with any degree of assiduity. Certainly not enough to develop my craft so that what I produced was readable. And I don’t think I’m the exception. I’ve seen trust fund babies, and other fully-supported writers, and 99% of the time, they go nowhere.

And keep in mind what I do is only of value to a highly wealthy society that has leisure time to day-dream in other worlds.

But the incentives are the same as for the person who farms wheat or cows, or for that matter grows apple trees. If they had everything they needed, they wouldn’t work every day. Just when they felt like. Which means we rapidly, all of us would stop having everything we need.

You can say what you want about the inequities of wealth distribution. I have my own views on it. I’ll note that fields dominated by leftists are always the worst for exploiting workers.

However most of the time, when people complain about wealth distribution or disparate payment for work, they aren’t seeing the whole picture. Like the idiots who say doctors should be paid like teachers: they have no idea what’s involved in the training of a doctor, nor of the hours doctors work, when fully formed, nor of the responsibilities and pressures weighing on them. If they did, they might realize most doctors aren’t even particularly well paid (particularly when you take into account malpractice insurance. If teachers had to pay malpractice insurance, they’d have to pay to work. Particularly if we sued them for malpractice. (I have a list.))

Ultimately what those complaining of wage slavery are saying is “I want the world to look after me.” And when they get power they make everyone else slaves, and do away with those that require care, and take us all back to a brutal primitivism all so they can stay adult babies, mewling and puking their death cult philosophy.

The cake of communism/socialism is a lie. It’s stuffed with mass graves and worms and lives of misery, beneath the glittery frosting.

It put 100 million human beings in their graves in the 20th century alone. Let’s not give it another try. This has been tried, over and over. It’s impossible. The result is always death at the hands of the greedy psychopaths who resent us for not catering to their every need real and imagined.

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for August 2, 2021