I knew this even before I read Barry Brownstein’s essay at The Freeman, Capitalism Promotes Equality. You see, I’ve read enough history to know that modern plumbing is modern, meaning for the great masses of people it didn’t exist until about a century ago. I’m not yet a century old (working on it though) and I remember an aunt who lived in the country and whose house always smelled bad. That’s because she was sick a lot of the time, had no indoor plumbing and the chamber pot she kept in her bedroom only got emptied when a neighbor or a relative (such as I) came to do it for her. I lived in town with my mother and I never knew a time without a working toilet in a separate room of the house. This even though by any objective analysis we were poor.
But not the worst off. My friend Dalbert used to come running to our house every morning before school to use our working toilet because his parents had only an outhouse and he hated it. Some mornings he didn’t actually come running. He came walking as fast as possible while holding both legs together as tightly as he could. I remember how thrilled he was when before were entered junior high his parents finally got indoor plumbing.
If we had lived just a few decades earlier neither of us would likely ever had the convenience of indoor plumbing. That’s because we weren’t royalty or rich manor landlords, the class of humans who for at least 2,000 years have had either indoor plumbing or servants to empty their chamber pots for them. They and only they never had to put up with smelly living quarters or tramping 50 yards out to the outhouse on snowy cold winter evenings to relieve themselves.
Today 99% of all human beings, in America at least, have perfectly fine indoor plumbing from which they get clean fresh water and rid themselves of their waste with a flush. The 1% who don’t have it must not want it.
The only thing that has made all this difference is capitalism and free markets. To know how the retreat from capitalism and into the scourge of socialism soon leads to living in stink, all one need do is look to Venezuela and Cuba where soap and toilet paper are now hard to come by.
Even in Egypt in 2002 in a public restroom at the great Egyptian museum in Cairo I was handed a small portion of toilet paper by the attendant. That was it, one had to make do. Has Sheryl Crow moved to Egypt yet?
Ms. Crow would be equally happy in Eastern Turkey, the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon or Syria, places I aIso visited in 2002 and found memories of how my aunt had been forced to live. What a relief to get to Israel! You see, Israel is a modern country. They dumped their socialism, such as it ever really was in the kibbutzim, long ago. Too smelly.
The subtitle of Barry Brownstein’s essay is, “Equality in Consumption is Now the Norm.” Free market capitalism made that possible. He doesn’t mean that everyone can own a yacht or drive a Rolls Royce. But everyone can live a life that includes all the basic necessities for comfort and cleanliness without want for food and shelter as well as air conditioning, television, a decent automobile, and a smart phone. They can also indulge their sartorial eccentricities to their heart’s content. We see that everyday.
If we could extricate ourselves from the amount of socialism we already have without adding even more, it might even be possible for everyone who wants a job to have one.
The danger we face is that the Millennials who, heavily indoctrinated and poorly educated, think Bernie Sanders is just so cool.
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