You want to be free? How much you got?

by David Benjamin

“… The president-elect has 96.2 million followers on X, while Mr. Musk has 207.9 million. (Mr. Musk is also far richer than Mr. Trump. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he is worth $458 billion, while the president-elect is worth a mere $6.61 billion.)…” — NY Times, 19 Dec.

MADISON, Wis.—Once, one of my readers, Jacob, disputed my liberal distrust of the giant corporations that have offshored their manufacturing facilities—and even management—to low-wage outposts in Asia. Jacob averred that these companies were boosting wages for the sweatshop workers in Bangladesh and East Timor while reducing labor costs for their U.S. employers. Said Jacob: “It’s win-win for the one who’s outsourcing and the one who is getting the work.”

I’m not sure he knew this, but Jacob evinced the classic Marxist view that whoever controls the means of production gets to call all the economic shots. I also got the sense that Jacob never had the sort of job he deemed a “win” for the folks—overseas or here at home—who perform those mind-numbing, spirit-crushing routines for eight, twelve, sixteen hours every day, six or seven days a week.

Jacob seemed above it all. His perspective was unsullied by empathy.

As often happens, the paradox posed by Jacob reminded me of a movie. In Midnight Run, Robert DeNiro plays a defrocked police detective named Jack. Employed by a sleazy bail bondsman to chase down petty crooks, Jack hates his job. The “midnight run” he agrees to undertake is dangerous. But if he succeeds, his payday will allow him to kiss his rotten job goodbye. He will earn what Burt Reynolds, in another movie, Heat, called “fuck-you money”—an amount big enough to set him loosee from his debts, his creditors, his bosses and his shame.

At heart, the soiled heroes in both movies are chasing freedom. In a pure capitalist state—typifying the “win win” oversimplifications of my esteemed critic Jacob — liberty is not an unalienable right endowed by our Creator, nor is freedom earned through hard work, punctuality, dependability, honesty and loyalty.

You buy it.

The hitch is that the price is princely. You can’t buy freedom as a skip tracer for a bail bondsman, on an assembly line in Shenzhen or in a minimum-wage gig at Wendy’s. What you have to do, as DeNiro and Burt Reynolds make clear, is to find a way—ethical or otherwise—to make a bundle so big you can flip your finger at the foreman and walk away with most of your fingers intact.

In Pakistan, your three bucks in daily wages, or your twenty dollars a week, isn’t enough to turn the corner, buy your ticket out of the sweatshop and live your dream. It’s not even enough to move out of the company dormitory and buy a car to sleep in. Somebody’s “winning” in this labor market but it ain’t the laborer.

Nor is there any whiff of victory in an America where anyone working forty hours a week at the apparently eternal minimum wage of $7.25 can’t feed two kids without the humiliation of paying for corn flakes with food stamps.

Nor is there a discernible win for workers laid off “at will,” although they do reap 26 weeks on the dole, after which they’re free of a job and income-free in a labor market innately prejudiced against applicants under the age of twenty and over the age of forty that has not noticeably improved the prosperity of wage-earners since 1980.

In any country, there’s stuff you can buy on a wage of two bucks a day, or even ten times as much. There’s stuff a jobless American can buy with an unemployment check. But none of this stuff is freedom.

Nor is it victory.

Ironically, in Midnight Run, Jack wins his freedom by forsaking his lifelong work ethic. He blows off his boss and sets loose his crook, after which the crook gives Jack some of the money he has stolen from the Mob—which made its fortune by trafficking in drugs, gambling, prostitution and extortion.

The movie’s moral is that if you’re a normal working slob, you can never afford to buy freedom unless you get Hollywood-ending lucky. Also, crime pays.

When you think about it, that’s also the moral of capitalism as it applies, currently, to honest labor. As long as seemingly conscientious people like Jacob harbor the belief that all stakeholders are benefiting equally from a fundamentally feudal economic model that places the lowest possible value on its highest-value component—the toil of human beings—the thieves in the movie will walk away from whatever havoc they wreak, scot-free and filthy rich.

In our recent election, a normal slob named Ruben Gallego won the Senate race in Arizona partly by convincing voters that he understood their plight. He knows, from experience, what it’s like to live from paycheck to paycheck—and sometimes not that far. He didn’t “win” until his exceptional intelligence and fierce determination got him into Harvard. He then enhanced his electoral “authenticity” by serving a hitch in the Marine Corps. Gallego beat Kari Lake because he never forgot how it feels to sweat out two lean and hungry days before the eagle flies, and to swallow hard when the price of milk goes up a dime a quart.

Lately, however, Gallego seems the exception who proves the rule—that the rich get richer and the rest of us say, “Whaddya gonna do?” For at least two years, Senator Gallego won’t be free to keep one promise to the working stiffs who elected him.

While all of America’s “disengaged” voters are once more disengaged (’til November 2028), Jacob’s win-win rich guys are quietly moving into the White House. Their tribune is a billionaire from South Africa, who’s renting—for $300 million—the presidency of the United States. He takes pride in firing people, a skill he shares with his new BFF, a silver-spoon sociopath who saved himself from bankruptcy by pretending to fire people on TV. In an overnight blitzkrieg of “tweets” this week, Elon Musk contrived to kill legislation that would have provided paychecks to millions of wage-earning civil servants and soldiers. Tugging his aged protégé gently by the nose, Elon took away relief, food, shelter, hope—at Christmas time—to thousands whose homes were wrecked, whose crops were ruined and bridges washed out, whose livelihoods were shattered by floods and hurricanes. Musk, who wants government money to land his spaceship on Mars, took money away from little kids with leukemia.

Our two new billionaires-in-chief did this to save money for other amigos who have lots of money and many houses, but always want more.

Jacob, my inadvertent Marxist, is right, except that Americans don’t mistrust the oligarchs who control the means of production and now, more and more, the means of communication. Indeed, we idolize our plutocrats and envy the men who never lifted a shovel except at a ceremonial groundbreaking, never reamed a beam or painted a bar joist, who never loaded a truck, gutted a steer, plowed a row or picked tomatoes, fought a fire, taught a class, waited on tables, tended bar or begged for overtime. Neither Elon nor his kemo sabe have ever been fired from a job, or even applied for one. Perhaps that’s the secret of their appeal.

Like the slave laborers of Xinjiang, most of us feel drowned by the sweat of our brow. We’ve worked with our hands and accepted chump change for sustenance. We’ve consigned ourselves to the mercy of the rich and unapproachable—and, for all that, we’re ashamed.

With few exceptions, the old white men who giveth labor, taketh it away and ship it elsewhere have never had a job or asked for one. They’ve never been disgraced by needing to work. They can say “Fuck you” to everyone.

That’s why we love ’em.