by John Young
Imagine a family in which the husband is an engineer and the wife is a lawyer, earning a combined $180k/year. They live in a housing development in a nice suburb, in a home with a mortgage costing $3,500/month. They both drive late model cars, with each car requiring $525/month in car payments. Somehow, in their busy lives, they managed to conceive a child who is put in daycare for $300/week. Because they are very busy, they grab something at McDonald’s on their way into work, eat lunch out and most evenings they grab some form of take-out for dinner. They take their work clothes to the dry-cleaner, and every couple of weeks they have a cleaning service take care of vacuuming the house and tidying up. Being very busy, they barely know their neighbors, but that’s okay because their neighbors are busy too. Attempts to set up a neighborhood barbecue once each summer have some basic success, but conversation is strained and people can’t remember each other’s names.
This is the general family model put forward in the propasphere. You see it implied in advertising, present in daytime TV, and presented as an ideal for which people should strive. It conforms to a world where everything takes place solely in the market economy. Listening to the news or watching TV, you’d get the impression that the market economy is the only one that exists.
And this is understandable. Cable TV itself collects over $100 billion annually just to keep people entertained and misinformed. Likewise, advertisers and programmers are all selling something in the market economy. Hence, their motivations are consistent with what they present. Obviously, banks and governments are quite fond of market economies because everything can be sorted, taxed, tallied and measured. As far as banking and government are concerned, if it doesn’t happen in the market economy, it doesn’t exist. I’ll come back to that point shortly.
Of course, the imagery and presentation of advertising ideals is only germane to the very small portion of our people who can afford to live like that. Only 16% of our people have the IQ to be lawyers, registered nurses and the like. And only 1.7% of our people have the IQ to be engineers, doctors or scientists. Only 5% of Americans have combined household incomes exceeding $150k.
Those of us who aren’t too entranced by our boob tubes realize that what happens outside of the market economy is called life. A lot of people realize that a life dominated by market economics, where everything is a number or a status symbol, or where one’s value is determined solely by their paycheck, can be the road to a doomed meaningless existence. For this reason, not everyone with the requisite IQ to pursue higher income careers falls down that hole – there are a number of very very bright subsistence farmers out there. An important aspect of adding “diversity” to the mix is that among European-Americans, even high intelligence and motivation are insufficient, so a large number of highly capable European-Americans are under-employed. Of course, the more one’s life depends upon the market, the more their security and well-being are tied to forces completely outside of their control.
This means that taken in practice, about 95% of our people supply at least a portion of their needs outside the market economy. These needs are provided by two economies seldom mentioned in the propasphere: the community economy, and the home economy.
It helps to think of “economics” as an exchange of solutions to problems. If I have a toddler who needs to have diapers changed, food prepared, engaging play and kept from danger … that is a problem. The solution can be provided by myself in person, by a close relative, by a neighbor whose cars I fix, or by a commercial daycare facility with the requisite diversity quotas. The same applies to help with my back yard garden. If I need it weeded, maybe I can have my teenage daughter do it, or I can have a neighbor help me in exchange for part of harvest. Or, maybe I will bring in an illegal worker from Honduras and let him sleep in the chicken coop and pay him $5/day.
The market economy, by its nature as a profit-driven enterprise, seeks to displace all other economies.
But more importantly, many market solutions have a price that is artificially low because some portion of the underlying costs is paid not by the provider of the market solution, but by the community or home economies in some disguised or unknown way. That is to say that not all of the costs of some market solutions are reflected in their price because the creator of the solution has figured out a way of forcing others to pay those costs, usually without their knowledge or consent.
When low-wage immigrant labor is brought in to keep the cost of lettuce low, there are adjunct costs that are not paid by the company who hires the immigrant. For example, if the immigrant has an anchor baby, suddenly that baby is declared a US citizen (though it should not be), and then the US taxpayers are on the hook for making up the difference between the low wages and the poverty line, providing food assistance, medicine, etc. In fact, in aggregate, U.S. taxpayers spend over $141B annually in direct costs to subsidize immigrants. Which means, in fact, that the price of lettuce reflected in a Big Mac only accounts for a portion of its costs.
Although immigration is a hot-button issue, there are plenty of other examples. How about putting tetraethyl lead in gasoline? Lead has been known as a cumulative systemic and neurotoxin since the horse and buggy days. Nevertheless, it was added to gasoline for decades as an “anti-knock” compound – which allowed lower-quality gasoline to function as though it were of higher quality. The cost (to the manufacturer) of adding the lead was cheaper than the cost of producing a higher quality product.
But what of the other costs? It turns out that the 56% drop in violent crime rates in the United States from 1992 to 2002 is attributable to reduced lead exposure in children.(1) Although not all crime is attributable to lead exposure, several studies have shown that overall violent crime rates track environmental lead levels from gasoline with a precise 22-year lag across the world. (2) (3) Obviously, crime is a complex phenomenon driven by numerous factors, including demographics. But even with unfavorable demographic trends, removing lead from gasoline and thus reducing ubiquitous lead exposure likely cut violent crime rates by more than half.
What this means is that the cost, the FULL cost, of adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline was far higher than the price of the chemical. The cost absorbed by communities and households in the form of a violent crime rate 56% higher than it would otherwise have been is incalculable. Though we can estimate direct costs of law enforcement and imprisonment, we cannot calculate the human suffering of people who should never have become criminals, children who were murdered and never came home, families who grew up missing a parent, etc.
So how much should leaded gas have cost to FULLY account for its ENTIRE cost? Although it is impossible to put a precise number to it, we can be confident that it would have been prohibitively expensive to buy, and thus the market would have found another solution.
And so we find with the proverbial head of lettuce. If it were being sold in the supermarket for enough to cover the costs of Americans murdered by illegal aliens, the welfare subsidies and the quality of life issues, lettuce would be too expensive to buy, and agribusiness would have to find another solution.
If you have ever gone to a farmer’s market, perhaps expecting to get extra low prices only to walk away surprised at the high cost, you have discovered something about the community economy: it cannot hide its costs elsewhere, and thus has to incorporate nearly all of the costs in the price of a product or service, and as a result its prices are higher.
This is more evident with commodities such as food or with home manufactured beauty products than it would be with a convenience store that simply resells materials from the broader market economy. But this is why home-grown or community made items seem so expensive.
Within a household, the home economy provides practically zero room for shifting of costs. If trash overflows the kitchen wastebasket, it just means more work for the very person whose job it might be to empty it. Although home economics typically deal more with matters of time and opportunity than money, the results are inescapable and as a result of the fact the time of household members has limits, chores and projects are prioritized. Any project that entails a certain expenditure of time and materials actively prevents that same time being spent on some other task.
Although any of these three economies can be applied to solve many problems, there are instances where one provides a solution more optimally than the others. By “optimally” I mean with the lowest TOTAL costs, both obvious and hidden. Whenever a solution is provided by the wrong economy, it comes with adjunct costs that get distributed in many cases even among people not using that solution.
Daycare is an obvious example. Once again, only 5% of Americans have household incomes exceeding $150k. In the states where someone is most likely to be earning such wages, the average monthly cost of daycare for one child is around $1,850 per month. Since that is paid with after-tax money, the parent has to earn at least $2,643 per month before taxes, just to pay for childcare. That’s $31,714 per year that is exclusively dedicated to child care. Add to this the costs of working – all of which come from after-tax money … $515 for a car payment, $500 for gas, $200 for insurance, $400 for lunches and coffee, $200 for clothes … and that’s another $2600/month or $31,200 per year exclusively dedicated to the costs of working. If you are earning $75,000 – half of that top 5% family income – after the costs of daycare and working, you only have $12,000 left over … or $8,400 after taxes.
Of course there are other costs to this. Not only are you working 40 hours a week in order to produce a net financial benefit of only $161/week to your family, but there are quality of life issues. Studies show that kids in even the best daycare settings are more likely to engage in aggressive and disruptive behavior for many years after they have left daycare. A Heritage Foundation study demonstrated that kids from daycare settings demonstrated less social competence compared to those raised by parents. Kids who spend more than one day a week in daycare are likely to experience attachment insecurity, and this leads to further manifestations of anxiety and depression.
In other words, the market solution to raising children creates long-term community and home costs that are not accounted for in the market price, and will likely exceed whatever value is derived from the net financial benefit of $161/week derived from working.
Lettuce has become an almost universal talking point with regard to immigration. At issue is that the only way agribusiness can make a profit is to lower costs because most items are traded as commodities. A key way to lower costs is to import low-wage labor. Hence you will sometimes hear the battle cry: “I’ll pick my own damned lettuce!”
But what if you grew your own? Lettuce in particular is a crop that, if you have a sunny window, you can literally grow anywhere in the continental US all throughout the year. A packet of seeds costs only $1. The time investment is minuscule. So you can definitely grow your own lettuce less expensively than you can buy it in the store while at the same time eliminating all of the adjunct costs not included in the store price.
Doing something like this was previously called “Home Economics,” recognizing that the home is indeed an economy. The field of Home Economics saw the home as a center of production rather than one of consumption, and thus it not only liquidated its own costs, but could often produce a surplus as well. This was even more evident back in the days before employeeism when most people pursued their professions as blacksmiths, seamstresses and even doctors from accommodations within their own homes.
But even with outside employment, it should be understood that every dollar worth of home production is worth more than that same dollar earned outside the home, because as far as banks and governments are concerned, the dollar of home production does not exist.
According to the USDA, the 2014 cost of a “moderate” food plan for a family of four is $10,712/year. This would require before-tax earnings (after work expenses) of $15,303. If a person were to be enterprising and plant some fruit trees and grow an effective garden, saving even $3,000 from the annual food bill, that would be the same as earning $3,000 completely tax-free dollars. Going back to the example of working with a child in daycare, just growing that garden, all by itself, provides nearly half of the net economic benefit of a $75,000/year job.
The same applies with acquiring DIY skills. I recently re-shingled 1,200 square feet of roof for a friend. The quote from a contractor using illegals for doing that work was $7,500 he did not have. Doing it myself over the course of a weekend, the materials and disposal cost $1509. This is the same as if I handed my friend $6,000 tax-free dollars that nobody knew about. And that is part of the community economy in which all winter long that same friend will plow the end of my driveway – for free – anytime it snows.
The market economy cannot be avoided. But it also hides costs throughout our society that come back to hurt us. Many goods and services we buy fund anti-free-speech and anti-second-amendment initiatives. Yet others fund our own demographic extinction. Everything we can cost-effectively shift from the market economy into the home or community economy is a net benefit both for our own personal wellbeing, and for the wellbeing of the European-American nation.
(1) http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-lead-poisoning-science-met-20150605-story.html
(2) https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/ban-on-leaded-petrol-has-cut-crime-rates-around-the-world-398151.html
(3) http://www3.amherst.edu/~jwreyes/papers/LeadCrimeNBERWP13097.pdf
(4) https://web.archive.org/web/20071020072714/http://www.mtbe-eresource.com/liu.cfm