Swimming In Two Pools

I KNEW A LADY on Facebook who had two swimming pools; a large one, and a small one. "I got a great big pool in my back yard. I got another great big pool right beside it": (Randy Newman:"Its Money That Matters"). Each day, she posted a picture of both of them on Facebook, side by side.The picture never changed.The small one, she explained, was actually a jacuzzi, The lady never posted a picture of herself that was less than thirty years old; she had been an attractive young adult, and I estimated her age in real space time to be close to mine, perhaps in her sixties. Nice looking, she was doubtless a nice looking late middle aged woman, a bit too concerned about her aging, distinguished looks. Wisely, she chose not to show her entire house, but just enough of it to convey an impression of fashionable, upper middle class affluence. Affluence signaling, as I saw it, without the inconvenience and risk of alerting thieves in the Tampa, Florida area where she lived and Facebook riff raff of the precise location of what to her was undoubtedly her greatest source of pride, probably courtesy of a husband with a lucrative professional career of some sort. She never mentiond him either, except indirectly, vaguely. Mafia type, maybe... I have a nice house too, but no pool, and I don't take pictures of it, pictures of myself, or pictures of anything else for that matter, for many reasons, for any reason, mainly photographic laziness. For me, a cell phone is a cell phone, not a camera, and I know what I and my material possessions and cats look like, and give not a fig whether anyone else does. It must be frustrating, wanting so badly to show the world your wealth, stymied only by an awareness that showing off comes with the risk of putting your pride and joy in jeopardy of attracting unwanted and perhaps harmful guests. I can remember a time,fifty years ago and more, when people who had money and material wealth were admired for their "success" and presumed social superiority. Admiration turned to resentment as a series of mid to late twentieth century recessions rubbbed millions of wage stagnated lower middle and working class Americans the wrong way.The shrinking middle class bifurcated, upper, and lower. Wages of the middle and working classes for fifty years have not kept pace with prices and corporate profits is a barnyard full of chickens coming home to roost.The expanding wealthy class,the expanding poor class, and our shrinking middle class helps explain our current political polarization. Without an economic center, the political center cannot hold. The free market is not the solution to every economic problem. The free market untainted by government intervention is not the solution to all economic problems, as Adam Smith is allegedy, wrongly, thought to have believed. Actually Smth said that all government action on behalf of the poor is desirable, but that no government action on behalf of the wealthy is. Those who cite Smith's seminal 1776 work "The Wealth of Nations" as the "Bible" of capitalistic economics are not inclined to mention this. In today's America, the middle class continues its fifty year shrink, and both extreme ends so the economic spectrum are expanding, somewhat alarmingly. At some point, to salvage what is left of free market capitalism, this trend will have to abate, and then reverse itself. The more money distributed among the more previously poor, marginal consumers, by whatever means, the more consumers of goods and services there are to produce the more manufactured wealth, by demanding a greater supply of it. Workers are also consumers, and there are more of them than there are wealthy or middle class purchasers of good sand services. One only needs so many television sets, cell phones, cars, and refrigerators. We can either give unto the poor with improved wages, or with governemnt transfer payment subsidies, to make real consumers out of them. Both ways work, work for good wages being the preferable means. It is the base of the economic pyramid that is the largest part, and which supports the entire structure, bottom to top. All that human beings build is built from the ground up, or, as Abraham Lincoln said, labor is prior to capital, and must be given the first consideration. A pyramid shaped society is what we want, with a long, flattened pyramid, where top and bottom are within reach of each other. After all, we all prefer swimming in a pool large enough to be more than a mere jacuzzi.