Lies were not the only bodyguard
which capitalism had had to employ to defend itself against socialism. We turn
our attention from ideology to sociology.
It is time to recognize that the
once-honorable professions, medicine, law, accountancy and education, have been
converted into sinecures for the protection of middle-class privilege. Their
remuneration and status has grown in inverse proportion to their actual social
contributions. Instead of autonomous, self-governing guilds of highly-trained
professionals, rightfully claiming exemption from certain of the economic and
legal rules governing normal business activity on account of their unique
services, they have metastasized into powerful labor syndicates, exploiting
their privileged status to exact more and more tribute from the economy for
ever-dwindling social benefits.
Within each of these institutions
there remains (one hopes) a core of valid professionalism which it is in the
interests of society to preserve. But surrounding this putative core is a husk
of opportunism, incompetence, bureaucratic string-pulling, politicking, and
plain hucksterism reminiscent of established religion at its worst. Gresham’s Law operates:
when professionalism is replaced by its counterfeit, the true professionals are
suffocated and dumped out, replaced by ever-greater numbers of cocky
frauds.
All of this would merely be an
unpleasant sidelight of modern life were it not for the sheer scale which
professional bloat has achieved. Professions, after all, are part of the
service economy. Their job is to
render the productive side society more efficient and productive, through
disease suppression and lifespan extension, crime and violence reduction,
maintenance of financial rationality, and education of the young. Instead, they
have become ends in themselves, drowning out the real producers in our society
with wave after wave of middlemen, regulators, and
certificate-awarders.
And so we get a health-care system
touting itself as “the finest in the world,” but which is actually one of the
worst in terms of measurable health benefits to the public weighed against its
cost of maintenance. And a legal system in which simple everyday justice
dwindles in direct proportion to the legions of Yuppie Law and Order fans graduated from law
schools. CPAs live in morbid fear of a simplified tax code which would put
three-fourths of them out of business. And the academic world charges
America’s parents ridiculous fees for
the privilege of indoctrinating their children in the latest frivolities of the
Modern Language Association and its interdisciplinary
equivalents.
Who pays for this waste? In the
short run, of course, we do, whenever we visit the doctor or pay a tuition bill.
But from an economic standpoint, it is not the consumer who pays but the
business economy. For all of this is financial overhead, part of the cost of doing
business in America. The businesses which
actually produce value must pay their employees enough, either in the form of
higher wages or higher benefits, to feed the voracious appetite of parasitic
professionalism. They must subtract this cost from the profits which their
enterprises yield. This subtraction reduces their competitiveness because it
lowers the amount of retained profit which they can convert into investment
capital to maintain and upgrade their operations.
The major source of this nasty
situation was political:
capitalism’s fear of socialism. Leftist agitation of the working classes against
so-called capitalist exploitation frightened our business classes into believing
that they needed to tolerate the growth of a vast middle class to buffer
themselves against the specter of social revolution. The middle class was
therefore allowed to play the role of mediator between labor radicalism and
business conservatism. Their sociology changed from its old shopkeeper base to
the professions, and the vast numbers of support staff which professionals claim
to need. This new middle class was granted economic sustenance to finance its
numerical increase on a scale sufficient to play its buffer role. Of course,
once assigned this mediator status, the new middle class acquired a stranglehold
(known as the Democratic party) over the political process which became
extremely difficult to break.
The business world’s fear of
polarization between working class and bourgeoisie could have been largely
perceptual. We may never know. But one of the tools used to shield us from ever
having to find out was the creation of today’s bloated middle class. Now that
the notion of a class-conscious proletariat has joined its progenitors –
Marxism, socialism, and communism – as just another abandoned storefront on the
boulevard of mankind’s broken dreams, it’s time for capitalism to audit the
price it pays to subsidize professional bloat, and the efficiencies that could
be achieved from the “liquidation of the middle as a class” (apologies to a
certain notorious historical figure).
Abolition of the middle class would
require major reforms of the so-called professions that lie at its core. These
reforms are not difficult to envision, since the normal operation of the
business economy has already introduced most of them, although in forms
distorted by the featherbedding of the current professionals whom they threaten.
Medicine, for example, needs to fully abandon the sentimental Marcus Welby model
of the independent, entrepreneurial practitioner in favor of a more rational,
assembly-line method of delivering therapy. Diagnostic procedures should be more
fully automated. “Heroic” interventions need to be minimized, in favor of
prevention and disease-management techniques. Rigorous cost-efficiency models
must be applied to all therapeutic modalities. The status of health care
providers should be drastically reduced, to the level of well-trained mechanics.
The MD degree should probably be eliminated.
In all of the professions,
computerization, and reorganization based on computerization, will lend itself
to a sharp reduction in the ranks of the middle class by converting
“professionals” into ordinary workers, in much the same way that airline pilots
are now being declassed into train drivers as a result of the computerized
cockpit. As this process advances, enormous fiscal savings will accrue to the
economy, making possible faster rates of growth and greater productivity across
the board.
The middle class will emit thick
clouds of rhetoric bewailing these reforms. Incipient fascism will be predicted,
resurgent Dark Ages will be announced. Since this class is not capable of
generating much in the way of real resistance, reformers ought not to be
deterred. Instead, they should bear in mind what Leon Trotsky, an expert on
classes headed for the “ashcan of history,” said about an opponent’s speeches:
that they worked, not on the heart, nor on the mind, but on the nerves. So also
with the rhetoric of the middle class.
Abolish the middle class. It will
pay dividends. And it will clear the air!
