A Labor Day Question: Is Elon Musk Really Worse than Jay Gould?

SURVIVAL OF THE RICHEST:  History, it turns out, does not repeat itself. It stutters. Mark Twain did not say that. I did. 

It’s stuttering right now. Over Labor Day.

Every Labor Day, my thoughts turn to Jay Gould, one of the most violently predatory robber barons of the late 19th century, who bragged, “I can hire half the working class to kill the other half.”

Gould delighted at being the most vilified industrialist of his time. He wasn’t exaggerating. When his railroad workers went on strike — after Gould had cut wages — he’d call out the militia, the national guard, the Texas Rangers, the Pinkertons, and any goon willing to swing a stick for pay. If that wasn’t enough, he starved out his workers’ families and evicted them from their homes. In an effort to consolidate all railroad tracks and telegraph lines — the industrial glue that held the nation together — there was no law Gould wouldn’t break, no bribe he wouldn’t make. Hell, he printed phony stock of a rival and claimed ownership. It worked. 

Bringing Gould to mind this year is our very own Elon Musk, who, with 80 SpaceX rocket launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base this year — with another 20 ready to go — qualifies as a local presence. Musk famously preaches about the evils of “empathy,” likening it to a form of civilizational suicide, a form of mollycoddling the weak and unfit. 

Evolutionary biologists will insist just the opposite, noting the human species owes its survival to a random flaring of biochemical electrical impulses that manifest as empathy and compassion. 

While Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency failed to save anywhere near the $2 trillion it promised, it did slash 271,000 federal jobs — that’s close to the number of soldiers, sailors, and Marines in uniform at the end of World War II. As far as dead bodies go, several studies allege that the cuts that Musk’s department inflicted on international aid programs resulted in 750,000 deaths, mostly through diarrhea, malnutrition, and HIV. Musk almost makes Jay Gould look like small potatoes.

For my Labor Day celebration, I’d visited a friend up north and came back with COVID. I quarantined myself at home and took medications that cost me $752. Yes, $752 and yes, that’s with insurance. Without insurance, the young woman behind the counter informed me, the price would have been $1,800. To be fair, she exhibited signs of empathy and compassion.

Naturally, I called Marina Owen, head of CenCal, which administers Medi-Cal insurance. Under Trump’s Big Bloated Budget from last year, Owen reminded me, 50,000 people in her service area are expected to be pushed off their insurance.

Labor Day, as a holiday, was officially recognized in 1894 by President Grover Cleveland, who was freaking out over all the labor unrest erupting in response to how robber barons like Jay Gould were treating them. What had Cleveland really worried was that union agitators would claim May Day, then a day that socialists and anarchists celebrated, as their day. Sound familiar? So, Labor Day was part gesture, part salve, and part distraction.

A few points worth noting: I was born during what economists call the Great Convergence, which lasted from 1955 to 1979. When I was a kid, 35 percent of all workers belonged to unions and the average CEO made 20 times more than the average worker. When I moved to Santa Barbara in 1983, it was the beginning of the Great Divergence. Then, only 20 percent of American workers were unionized and the average CEO made 44 times more than the average worker. Since then, the top CEO has come to make 281 times as much as the average worker. The average CEO saw his or her wages increase by 1,100 percent. The average worker experienced a 26 percent rise in income. 

Oh, and today, less than 10 percent of the American workforce belongs to a union. 

People bemoan the loss of the middle class. Where did it go? Look at the union membership numbers. And even they are inflated, the vast bulk belonging to government unions.

Back when the French government tried to extend the age of retirement from 62 to 64 — for purposes of collecting retirement benefits — millions of pissed-off French people took to the streets. Garbage workers stopped picking up trash, oil workers stopped producing oil, and everything came to a screeching halt. My wife was forever getting outraged at how we never got outraged enough. I would forever respond with what I thought was a French Gallic shrug. It never made things better.

Her question haunts us all.

Under Trump’s Big Bloated Budget Bill, programs for underprivileged people are getting cut by $1.4 trillion. Under that same budget, the top one percent is reaping tax breaks worth $1 trillion.

You do the math.

An interesting coincidence. According to Howard Rosenthal, one of the smartest political thinkers no one has ever heard of, the more polarized we’ve become economically, the more polarized we’ve gotten politically. Between 1955 and 2004 — the Great Convergence to the Great Divergence — the number of centrists serving in Congress dropped from 33 percent to 8 percent. In the Senate, the numbers went from 39 senators to only nine. What happened? According to Rosenthal, Democrats went to where the money was. At the time, that was Big Tech. 

According to Mark Twain, history doesn’t repeat; it rhymes. 

Maybe we’re both right.