Come outside.

I'm not psychologically up to writing about global warming or nuclear war today. Let's talk about something else. Like, say, housework.

An honest analysis of housework clearly shows the difference between liberal views and leftist views, between establishment-friendly views and dissent. It's a good way to show the difference between being inside the Asylum and outside it. Discuss housework honestly, and you can dismantle capitalism.

I loathe housework. I never push a mop or scrub a floor without thinking to myself why do I have to do this shit. Now, the first thing to point out is how dangerous it is to state something like that publicly. The cardinal sin in American culture, or what's left of it, is laziness. I guess the old Puritan work ethic was too useful for them to trash it along with accurate vote counts, habeas corpus, and the right to disagree with political leaders. Good people are never supposed to object to work. Work is an intrinsic good. More than that, work is a way for Americans to engage in a peculiar kind of machismo: the more unpleasant the work is, the more macho you are if you do it without complaint. Doing shitty work without complaint is the fast track to a good character in this country, particularly since it makes a person so useful to the establishment. You can be hauled out as an example of why no one should ever object to the conditions of their lives.

Housework must be done. I'm not arguing about that. Since no one wants to live in a junk heap, or to be condemned by health inspectors, housework is arguably necessary to a good life. Since it must be done, if I don't do it, it must get done some other way. The most obvious way is to hire someone else, probably some woman without much money, to clean for me while I enjoy life. Therefore, if I say I don't think I should have to do housework, I immediately get pegged as not only lazy, but also a woman of privilege who thinks she's too good to scrub floors.

This chain of logic, backed up by the Puritan work ethic, comes into play so automatically that, were I to go onto Twitter now and complain about doing housework, I guarantee you that within no more than a half an hour--probably much less--someone would accuse me of being "privileged." (That's if they knew I was female. If they were under the misconception that I were male, the accusations would be slightly different, though obviously hailing from the same belief system.)

However, I do actually think of poorer women than me as human beings who are worth no less than I am. I'm a leftist, and this is one of the fundamental leftist beliefs: accidents of birth and fortune do not increase or decrease a person's basic worth. Leftists also tend to look for solutions to problems, rather than assuming defeat or changing the topic to something more exciting, like who has a good moral character and who doesn't. Since I am a leftist, I immediately came up with a leftist solution to the problem of housework:

Suppose we abolished, nationwide, the notion of unpaid housework. What would that look like?

For some tasks housework-for-pay wouldn't be practical, because some housework requires such constant attention that a person would have to live in the house to keep on top of it. Tasks like that would probably remain unpaid labor, mainly because most people wouldn't want to live at work, and neither would most people like to have live-in servants, even if they could afford them. But suppose the rest of the housework in the nation was done for pay? And not for starvation wages. I'm talking about a real living wage.

Obviously, such a policy would represent a step up for a lot of people who are currently doing hard labor for very low wages, as well as making life better for a lot of other people who are trying to squeeze housework in around their "real" jobs. What may not be quite as obvious is the level of economic stimulus this change would provide. Housework, like food service, is undislocatable. It cannot be put on the internet. It cannot be sent offshore. If most of the housework in the country was done for a living wage, suddenly there would be a lot more money staying in the country, and the buying power of much of the country's population would increase, with obvious economic benefits for most people.

I'm still talking like a capitalist, I know. Bear with me.

The free-market folks, the small-government folks and the libertarians would all immediately clamor: But the market won't bear paying so many people a living wage for menial labor! If the market would bear such a thing, it would already exist!

Now, I don't engage in mystical discussions of what the market will and will not bear. In a post-2008, post-bailout, post-quantitative easing world, such ideas have all the force of the notion that the sun goes round the earth. After watching a bunch of bankers (helped by government officials) magic 16 trillion dollars out of their asses, just for a start, before continuing to bail themselves out unofficially on an ongoing basis, the idea of what the market will and will not bear starts to look kind of silly, as if I said that I couldn't write a short story involving space aliens because space aliens aren't real. Since the story itself is fictional, the only question is: Who has the authority to change the story?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's assume, for a moment, that the idea of the market bearing something means what they say it does. It is, after all, true, that I couldn't afford to pay a housekeeper or cleaning person 35K/year. Whether the market can bear it or not, I can't. So how could we get all those people a living wage?

What if the government subsidized housekeeping?

The idea of the government subsidizing anything sends small-government types, both libertarians and establishment types, into a tizzy. But after all, the government subsidizes lots of things. They subsidize weaponsmaking. They subsidize drilling for petroleum and methane. They subsidize the making of cars. They subsidize the insurance industry (with a great deal of hoopla and self-praise). And, as I mentioned above, they subsidize banking.

Apparently, none of these things counts as subsidized, I suppose because none of these things benefits anyone with less than 50 million dollars in assets. It's only a subsidy if it benefits someone in the bottom 80% of the economic ladder. Apparently.

Outside the Asylum, though, we can admit that when the government pays a lot of money into an industry or activity, that industry or activity is subsidized, just as government spending is government spending regardless of whether the money is going to a welfare mom or Northrop Grumman. So the government subsidizes all sorts of shit, including activities that are increasing the chance of our untimely collective demise. Why can't it subsidize housekeeping? It would be interesting to take 1% of the annual military budget, which currently resides at around 700 billion dollars, and put it into subsidizing housework, just as it would have been interesting to take 1 trillion out of the 16 trillion the financial industry gave itself and put it into the American economy.

There is no rational reason, no real reason, why housework could not be subsidized, to the great benefit of the bottom 80% of the population.

You'll notice that this leftist critique of housework differs greatly from any of the various liberal critiques. If I were a liberal, my critique would look like this:

You shouldn't want a poorer or darker-skinned woman to do your housework for you.

Or like this:

Men should do as much housework as women do.

Now, I'm not averse to the notion that, things being as they are, men should take as much responsibility for housework as women do. But that kind of begs the question of why we all have to do so much unpaid labor in a world where bankers, oil barons and insurance executives get "bailed out," or subsidized, to do incalculable harm. Given that capitalism insists that everything has a cost, and a value, that can and should be reckoned in dollars, and heaven help anyone so misguided as to ask for a "free ride," doesn't it seem odd that capitalism requires so much unpaid labor? I mean, it doesn't stop at housework. How about the care of the elderly? The ill? How about the care and raising of children? All of these things represent massive amounts of unpaid labor--and that's leaving out all the inmates of prisons who do unpaid work for both corporations and the state. Why should a system whose central tenet is that everything has a price rely so heavily on unpaid labor? Doesn't that indicate that it is, at best, a failed system?

There's one more liberal objection to my modest leftist proposal (asking for 7 billion dollars in subsidies, in a world where the U.S. military gets 700 billion dollars a year, is modest). Here it is:

But what if those women don't want to do housework, even for a living wage? Why should they have to do menial labor when you don't?

The answer to that, oddly enough, involves Walt Disney, not the most moral or praiseworthy political thinker I know. Yet he seemed to genuinely believe in a future in which technological advances and automation, rather than being an automatic justification for poverty, instead served humankind. This is the sign in front of Epcot, Disney's "city of the future:"

To all who come to this place of joy, hope and friendship, welcome.

Epcot is inspired by Walt Disney's creative vision. Here, human achievements are celebrated through imagination, wonders of enterprise and concepts of a future that promises new and exciting benefits for all.

May EPCOT Center entertain, inform and inspire and above all, may it instill a new sense of belief and pride in man's ability to shape a world that offers hope to people everywhere.

— E. Cardon Walker, October 24, 1982

If you ride the Big Ball ride at Epcot, Spaceship Earth, it takes you through a history of technological achievement that ends by asking the riders In this technologically advanced future, what will you do with your leisure time? The obvious assumption is that, if we can put a man on the moon, take pictures of people's license plates from space, or manipulate soldiers' brain fuctions via their helmets (https://www.vox.com/2014/12/2/7320397/super-soldiers-darpa), we could also create machines that relieve mankind of the need to do menial labor. This is a future that was sold to us over and over again, from the Jetsons to Star Trek to Disney World, from the fifties through the eighties.

Somehow, sometime in the eighties, that line of discussion was shut down.
Perhaps it was shut down because that line of discussion, if pursued, might require shutting down capitalism. If everybody gets relieved of the need to do manual labor, that means everybody has to have equal access to these fantastic machines. So the fantastic machines would have to cost very little, or nothing at all. Perhaps the fantastic machines would be provided to every citizen by the government.

Wait, that sounds like socialism. Uh-oh.

I don't think Disney, an ardent right-wing capitalist, thought this through. Somebody did, though, because that vision of the future was shut right down.

Here's the thing: I'm up for anything. If all we can do is offer living wages for all this unpaid labor, improving the lives of the bottom 80%, I'm all for it. If we can take the vast majority of this labor off everyone by providing them with technology that will do it for them, I'm also all for it--assuming the software that controls such machines is open-sourced. I'm not looking to give the Department of War one more way to conduct surveillance on the beleaguered populace.

I hope this thought experiment has elucidated the ways in which liberalism and leftism differ. I hope it also serves as a set of interesting challenges to those dedicated to preserving capitalism's reputation--against the odds.

How are you all today?