Eat the Rich

I’m as much of a mooncalf as anyone. I certainly had no interest in economics as a kid, as kids don’t. Children—lucky children at least—live in that ideal state postulated by Marx, where the rule is, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Getting grounded equals being sent to a gulag. Dad in high dudgeon is confused with Joseph Stalin. Then we wonder why so many young people are leftists. I had no interest in economics at college, either. I belonged to that great tradition of academic bohemia which stretches from the fifteenth- century riots of François Villon’s to the Phish tours of the present day. For university hipsters, there is (no doubt Villon mentions this in his Petit Testament ) nothing more pathetic than taking business courses. My friends and I were above that. In our classes we studied literature, anthropology, and how to make ceramics. We were seeking, questing, growing. Specifically, we were growing sideburns and leg hair, according to gender. It did not occur to us that the frat-pack dolts and Tri-Delt tweeties, hurrying to get to Econ 101 on time (in their square fashion), were the real intellectuals. We never realized that grappling with the concept of aggregate supply and demand was more challenging than writing a paper about “The Effects of Cool Jazz on the Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.” What the L-7’s were being quizzed on was not only harder to understand than Margaret Mead’s theories about necking in Samoa, it was also more important. The engine of existence is fueled by just a few things. Unglazed pottery is not among them. If the Rah-Rah Bobs and Pin-Me Sallys had been taking Love or Death courses, we would have been right there with them. But money was a different matter. We weren’t interested in money. Actually—what we weren’t interested in was work. Maybe we guessed that it would be a lot of work to b.s. our way out of memorizing such formulae as: Not that we weren’t up to the task: “Like, price—that equals wasting natural resources and the pollution thing, if you’re into the whole capitalist, monopoly rip-off, man.” And, of course, we were interested in money. I remember we’d get excited whenever we had any. It’s just that we were determined not to earn it. We would never go in search of money. Money was something that would come looking

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