arthur lecuyer
Jul 23, 2017 · 7 min read

As one should, I suppose, when one works really hard at something that they themselves cannot even define. If the question needs asking “What is it that I do?” then it becomes impossible to ascertain a value. Value is based upon what is known; its utility.

If what you do is unknown (especially to you) than it probably has little value. Utility is the key to this quandary. What is the usefulness, the object and the benefit inherent?

I’d say from my perspective that what you’ve delivered is empty. Unless the objective is visible, the benefit inherent and the product of effort useful; only then can you have delivered value.

Plumbers may indeed, at least from your perspective, be losers, but at the end of the day someone has reaped reward from their efforts. Tangible benefit has been received. The immediacy of result is both viewable and admirable. Most important of all, is that both parties have received something of benefit for the effort. There is running water for one and for the other the knowledge of having been able to deliver that running water. Plumbers never have existential questions about their worth. This is why plumbers are Winners. They never second guess the utility of their craft. How about you? Can you say the same?

“we spent our lives working with our backs so you don’t have to.”

You do understand that you parents didn’t say this because they were ashamed of who they were or of what they did. You’re kidding yourself if you think that at anytime prior to the 1950's you would have had any chance of not working without your back, despite whatever effort they had made. While the 50's did usher in an all new age of governmental largesse it wasn’t due to any specific personal or individual efforts but because of a onetime, once in the history of the world, opportunity granted by being the victors of a war that wasn’t fought on our shore, leaving us as the entire world economy. A gift squandered away in just a quarter century.

This was, after all, the great promise of the technological revolution. They didn’t want me to become a plumber or, per Marco Rubio, a welder. They wanted me to enter the class of doctors and lawyers, using my brain to acquire greater material reward.

Your ability to be a philosopher, as innate as it may be, would have almost never been possible without the aforementioned spoils of war. The technological revolution had absolutely nothing to do with it. Any technological advancement was, such as jet flight, Radar, cryptography and computers, due to the scientific research for the war.

Lastly, I hope you grasp that, your brains don’t, unless focused upon better usage of material, create material wealth. Hands do.

I can imagine that hands without a brain to guide them would be fairly useless. Can you imagine a brain without corporeal form accomplishing anything? Now every builder I’ve ever met, plumbers included, have not only mastered their craft but have also mastered problem solving in some of the most innovative, challenging ways and under some of the most dire circumstances. Something no philosopher has ever had to do; to figure it out, on the fly, sometimes in life or death situations.

I’ve read you interactions with Ron Collins and all I can say is : rather then ask him to read what you’ve written, how about you read what he’s written. This is one of the sharpest, articulate, erudite voices on Medium. He may seem gruff but he’s simply a no nonsense type of person who has little patience for navel gazing and intellectual snobbery.

As for me, the fact that you find yourself working in the vacuousness of Washington, questioning the emptiness of of your efforts and the value associated with that should leave you pause about, not only your effort, but the usefulness of government intervention. What real honest success have you seen coming out of Washington. I don’t mean success for Washingtonians but the sort of immediacy of value for everyday people as provided by plumbers. What I see are dictates and little else.

Everyone in politics and the corporate world knows that, in an office setting, the merits of intellect and expertise are fifty levels of importance below affability and who knows who. In fact, I’d argue it’s this very joke that has driven a wedge between elites and working class for the last century.

Yet, the discussion I’ve read between you and Ron shows that while you understand this intellectually you can’t seem to grasp it culturally. The culture you grew up with but lost the moment you entered academia, because now all that culture required from you came from one muscle. The grey matter one. Henceforth, from now till eternity, your hands are unnecessary except to write or type the things that come from that muscle. In other words, you’re now half the man you could’ve been. Perhaps even the lesser half.

I have written about the lost generation, this group of Americans who have seen no material gain despite decades of hard physical work, who are killing themselves…

You seem to think it’s because they couldn’t or wouldn’t rise up above their station in life. That they wouldn’t rise above their parents. Has it ever occurred to you that it’s because of you and those like you (and your mindset) that this group of Americans has seen no material gain. That all those material gains got sucked up into the elite institutions including academia. So now there’s less of us and more of you. We contribute the material and you contribute…what exactly? All this striving for advancement has left us with less abundance. Technological advance is not the same as abundance.

I’ve stated elsewhere that when everyone has a degree then everyone will need another. This time an advanced degree. After that everyone will need a doctorate. Then when everyone is special, absolutely no one will be. But can the world support everyone having a PhD and no one to build the infrastructure such as sewers, in order to have a toilet. We’re a long way away from robots building or repairing sewers.

The haves and have-nots are your invention. Just like in India, where you can have your PhD’s in 3 piece suits shitting in the streets, right along side the homeless and penniless. Use that big philosophical brain to understand that the government and academia haven’t done you any real favors. Oh sure you might make more money than I do, but are we (both you and I together) better off because of those two things?

Our government has grown 4 times as large by personnel but has its real (not quantitative easing i.e printing currency) output been even one tenth of that. Meanwhile business output, even high tech, has barely budged. Real GDP growth in material things is stagnant if not falling as are real wages. Outside of asset appreciation (stocks and bonds) and capital gains, where has there been any real growth, in material wealth, in 30, 40, 50 years. You’re the college boy, so you tell me what you’ve done that’s improved our material well being? What has your Government done? What has your University? What about your Civic organizations and institutions?

Crawford argues against the grain of the current class narrative. He says, in fact, that those of us who are physically animated are perhaps more grounded and intelligent than those who are not. When placed in contrast to office politics and personality tests, he says that physically intensive jobs are much more intellectually and analytically challenging.

Ding. Ding. Ding. Can you hear the bell ringing. You didn’t need to read this in a book, although I’m glad someone wrote it for the holier than thou set ensconced in their ivory towers. It’s all around you if you’d just ignore the automatic elitism that comes with academic institutions.

I now sense what I lacked: my father’s capacity to integrate his view of reality with the objects he manipulated with his hands. In him, the processes of thinking and doing were fully integrated; in me they were separated

Note how the further along in your writing the closer you get to fuller understanding. Still you’re divorced from what this really means. It’s really great that you’re thinking about this. Yet, it’s not about thinking, its about doing. And certainly not about thinking about doing or even how to do.

We’ve become a nation of takers. We take and take. We never give anything but advice. Well meaning but ultimately fruitless advice. We want the world to be just like us, so we throw our weight around, dictating how the rest of the world should behave. Democracy for everyone and anyone.

Meanwhile we’ve become fat and lazy. A nation of consumers, not producers. We became great because we made things; wonderful things. We produced. Now we just consume. Oh sure we have the best hospitals and medicine money can buy; universities too, but to what end. To be glutinous pontificating fools, unable to build the very things you simply cannot live without. You know the latest and greatest iThingy, meanwhile, back in the real world, there’s no clean water in Flint, MI. Or here, in my neck of the woods, they’re spending a third year rebuilding a bridge, carrying subway, vehicular and pedestrian traffic because our trusted public servants put off year after year after year for over 30 years the effort and expenditure to prime and paint the steel to prevent rust. Now to prevent collapse they’re spending 100x the money.

The political classes in our country are a mean, mean unpractical joke perpetrated against the American people. It all starts with useless degrees in political science, law, gender studies and the like. Even philosophy if it’s not tempered with the need to construct things, because only things have real value. Yes, people are things. Thoughts however are not. Just thinking accomplishes nothing. It is only by doing that one achieves real material wealth. So enjoy whatever money you make with your efforts to legislate or whatever else your thinking presumes to constitute actual value, because it comes at the expense of your mother, father and I and the builders.

All those who thought, as your parents and mine did, that relieving you of the burden of breaking your back was somehow good, are now seeing the fruits of their labor squandered on elitist notions of grandeur and narcissistic self importance. Without any material benefit or ingrained self sacrifice, as they had, for the forthcoming generations whose money we’ve already spent, and have been literally since the early 70's, partying like it’s 1999. Has there ever been a generation more spoiled yet less grateful than the last two or three (each successive being worse)?

    arthur lecuyer

    Written by

    A 50 something libertarian autodidact, teaching himself economics. Particularly those of the Classical and Austrian variety.

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