"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Adam Smith
"The rich man's primary dilemma is how to extract money from those who have none." Dave MacCannell
You can quote me on that.
You've seen the sentiment of Jefferson in the pages and posts of this blog before and you've seen that quote by Adam Smith. I think it's one of my favourites because of the delicious irony of the "Father of Capitalism" laying down the all time best burn on capitalism! This post will be about one tiny part of capitalism.
Capitalism is an unsustainable cycle and the end of the cycle will be marked by rebellion because those in charge of trying to sustain the unsustainable must revert to tyranny. The sign that we are approaching the end, and that very tyranny is when the rich have impoverished the poor to such a state that they now have to devise tyrannical ways to extract money from those who have none. This sounds like an impossibility but, credit where credit's due, wealth is a great motivator and from greed have ingenious enterprises arisen. In short, the rich have figured out how to get money from people who have none: give them the (false) hope of getting some. If that's not tyranny, what the hell is?
I have used this example before on this blog but it was an eye-opener to be sure! In China there are great hoards of people, sometimes euphemistically labelled "migrant workers," who go from job to job hoping that they will eventually find one that pays. They work a month for a company, (and in China this is rarely a month worth of 9-5) hope that at the end of the month there will be pay, but if not they move on and try again. They don't have legal recourse, nor the time to pursue it. They go from one exploitative employer to another, many dying during the process. This is China's major contribution to the "global economy" and don't kid yourself, we all take advantage of it. In fact most countries have imported the idea. I worked for a company called Hwasheng in China and every month they hired a different girl to help me with visa issues, translation, and general settling into China. Not one of these girls were paid. At the end of the month the old girl would leave and a new girl would arrive. The most curious part about it was that none of them ever seemed that upset or rebellious. Maybe, like Korea, the younger generation in China has been trained well not to stand up for themselves to delay the end of the Chinese iteration of capitalism, but it'll happen.
Lotteries, scams, cons, politics, dreams, myths, rags-to-riches stories, Disney movies, they are all designed to give the destitute hope of rising out of poverty and maybe even becoming rich someday. But there are pithy aphorisms that keep the poor in their place. The rich invest most of their money and spend the rest. The poor spend all of their money and invest the rest. Or, the rich buy assets while the poor buy liabilities they think are assets. In truly capitalist countries the worlds of the rich and poor are so far removed from each other as to prohibit even a rudimentary understanding of the other. I've just used the word "invest" but wouldn't have the slightest idea how to go about doing it and the vast majority of the really really good investment opportunities wouldn't even be open to my broke ass.
I'm no expert on most of these scams and schemes but I'll tell you one in which I am experienced and becoming more and more privy to the diabolical inner mechanics of: education. What is education if not the dream of improving ones station in life through learning? Nobody goes to university just to get smart. They go expecting to obtain knowledge and skills that can make them money. Who clings to education as hope for the future more than the poor? And who but the downright despicable exploit this hope?
Imagine if you will a school... Well, not exactly a school. In fact not in any tangible way is it a school by educational standards. In fact, let's start again...
Imagine there's a wedding or some such social occasion. By pure chance this wedding is attended by some highly unscrupulous people who have somehow lucked into positions of wealth and power. They might be inheritance wealth, flim flam or mafia wealth, it doesn't much matter. They engage in what Adam Smith calls that seldom encountered diversionary conversation with each other. As dependable as the natural phenomena that make the world go round, the conversation between businessmen swings around to contrivance and conspiracy. They want to do the unthinkable: they want to hijack the good names of others to untarnish their own. They want to do something so unprincipled that the public will believe they are principled. They want to build a lucrative business by cheating people, but they want that business to appear as something honourable. They want to get rich and become reputable at the same time. One of the wedding guests suggests they become "educators." It was so successful after the Korean war when Korea was a poor country and the citizens of Korea wanted to rise out of poverty that they shouldn't have too much trouble selling the idea to some other poor countries like, for instance, Bangladesh or Nepal. The sweetest part of the deal is (thank you China) there are lots of businesses in Korea who don't want to pay the wages that privilege has caused Koreans to expect. Why not get these students jobs too? Restrictions on international students working while studying have eased significantly due to some tenacious lobbying by fellow businessmen. These kids are so broke and 5 thousand won and hour looks like so much money to them, they'll jump at midnight shifts gutting fish or waiting tables for abusive bosses who pay way less than minimum wage. And by being such a valuable source of cheap labour in the community, business irregularities might be overlooked by regulators if, say a law or two might be fractured.
"What kind of laws one might ask? Well first of all we will need to attract good, reputable teachers in order to look legit, so we'll offer them a contract of 20 hours a week. A lot of universities allow teachers to get away with working this little or even fewer hours but not our 'school.' We'll add more hours to the teachers' duties once they are trapped in the country and have signed contracts for a full year. We'll give them abstractions like on-call hours and nebulous rules like give every student as much counselling as they require and we won't clarify anything - certainly not in the contracts - but we'll create an atmosphere of militaristic unquestioned authority and cultivate fear and intimidation by giving public official warnings for violations of these ambiguous rules. OUR teachers will work Korean hours, not the lazy hours foreign professors enjoy, and we'll even include a clause in the contract that says we won't pay them for these hours whether they exceed 40 a week or not."
"But isn't that illegal?"
"They signed the contracts agreeing to it. And besides, with all the low cost labour we bring, who's going to split legal hairs here?"
"BRILLIANT! But what if one of the teachers challenges the rules or even the laws?"
"We'll fire them. For a foreigner the legal recourse is so convoluted and even the government agencies to contact are so bogged down with purposely complex rules and regulations, most of which are difficult or impossible to find in English, that only a friggin' idiot would challenge us. Besides, we pay so little that they'd run out of money before they could complete that challenge. Why, we won't even have to pay the legal one month of pay in lieu of notice. It'll take more than a month for the teacher to get the government to do anything and that's only if the teacher can figure out how to do that."
"I don't usually say this but I'm kinda glad I came to this social event! Screw the teachers, screw the students, and screw the law, we're gonna make a pile of money outta this!" And a round of cigar smoking, pretentions drink drinking, and self-congratulatory back slapping ensues.
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