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Would you like to have a dresser like this for your child, or maybe for yourself? It’s my son’s.
It's a little loosey-goosey in some of its joints, but it's immensely strong. It is solid white oak, in a sort of very primitive Eastlake style. It has its original florid Art Nouveau drawer pulls and backplates, though one is busted. It's a real antique, if you use the definition: more than one hundred years old. It was made in some kind of factory, but only in the loosest sense of the word. Men all working in the same place making the same thing over and over. It still looks like people made it, not machines, though. The drawers are constructed with an unusual "circular" dovetail arrangement, something I'd read about but never seen.
I make furniture for a living. People often remark that my wife must feel lucky, and our house must be full of the wonderful things that I make. But it isn't, and she’s not. If I made it and we own it, it's something I dropped, or mis-measured, or put a leg on backward, or something else untoward happened to it. Because I can't afford the furniture I make, and the people that buy my furniture are too wealthy to purchase the furniture I buy. Mostly, our house is filled with junk. Junk like that dresser we bought this summer. Junque, they say on the roadside stands that sell the stuff.
That dresser cost us $45. We had to make a package deal, of course. We took a cast iron sink with faucets for $8, too. Otherwise the owner of the store might have held out for more for the dresser. You’d think anyone would have sense enough to purchase the dresser for $45, or maybe ten times that, and just throw away the sink if they didn’t want it, and could lift it. But you have to know what things are, and are worth, and what's necessary to make them into the kind of thing you want, and how much time and treasure and expertise it would take to make a new one like it.
You'd also have to know that the hideous screaming lime green paint it formerly had inexpertly smeared all over it would come off. Underneath the lime paint was another kind of hideous green paint and glaze popular in the 1950s, and called, inappropriately: antiquing. That had to come off too, and paint from the fifties was bulletproof compared to now. That’s a lot of “ifs” for a civilian. But answering these forty-five dollar final exam questions correctly is like cheating for me.
Furniture that old is all solid wood, and originally finished with shellac. I can always work with that. Newer furniture would be made of plywood, and covered with nitrocellulose lacquer, which is too strong to remove and too weak to last a hundred years -- an awful combination.
You'd also have to be able to fit slivers of pine to the bottom edges of the drawers to make up for the wear of a century or better of hard use. That's the easiest half-hour of work for me in a year.
Twenty dollars of stripper, some rubber gloves, some elbow grease, put the shellac back on, and put water-based finish on top gives you what see in the picture. I could make that dresser from scratch, but the materials alone would cost well over $150 (and I get them cheaper than you can), and tons of skilled man-hours, too. I can’t invest time like that into something for my family. I have to make furniture and sell it, or we starve. You’re much better off than I am if you’re reading this, but you can’t afford to invest the time and energy to take a flyer on a lime-green dresser, because you have to concentrate on being part of the very formal, specialized, and stratified economy, trying to make enough money to buy furniture from me, and pay your ever-increasing taxes.
So the dresser is a parable of a poorly understood principle. Poor people can’t afford wealthy people’s time. Wealthy people can’t afford poor people’s things, for the same reason: wealthy people’s time is too valuable, coming and going.
If you want to see a well-off person splutter, make them pay a plumber. For a brief moment, they get a glimpse of what it’s like to pay a skilled worker, summoned on demand, with the full freight of taxes, regulations, laws, set-asides, the requirements of licensing, and the formidable administrative costs of tracking all of that with the threat of IRS ruination hanging over their head at all times. The customer gets a peek – no more than that -- of what it’s like for a poor person to visit a doctor, or get a letter from a lawyer, or go to a dentist, or send a child to college, or deal with any professional or government worker. Poor people can never afford other people. Only themselves.
Wealthy people can afford the plumber, but they hate paying the money. Many claim all sorts of “diversity cred” by hiring illegal aliens instead, but they’re frauds, unwilling to pay their fellow citizens for all the things they require for themselves in a paycheck. Government for me, not for thee, when it’s time to send your child to college or buy a house, government for thee, not for me when they skip the 50 percent of overhead they demand for themselves but don’t want to pay for their cleaners and maids and yardwork and restaurant scutwork and carpentry and so forth. The doctor will pay the dentist and not think a thing about it, and vice versa. But pay a carpenter? The Home Depot parking lot is filled with carpenters, and they’re damn cheap at half the price.
NAFTA, and all its brethren, was a compact between the rich and poor, nations and individuals alike. High-wage jobs making things would move to places where overhead and wages were low, and inexpensive consumer goods would make life better for even poor persons. All the money that flowed internationally would make it possible for low-wage workers, (low by American standards, high everywhere else) dislocated by the emigration of jobs, to be hired by the beneficiaries of an explosion of wealth. It hasn’t happened.
Cliques were formed. Laws passed to pay doctors and college professors on behalf of the children of low-wage Americans are passed to ensure the wealthy get paid, not that the poor get anything. You can sum it up with the words on the back of an Apple product: “Designed in California. Assembled in China.” The beautiful people clique keeps their money amongst themselves, earned for them in distant places on the difference between American and Chinese wages and government intrusion in the market, and only lavishes it on other members of their clique at Apple, and other companies like it. The hell with everybody else.
I’m poor, and can’t afford a plumber, never mind a neurosurgeon or an Apple anything. Hell, I can’t even afford me. I buy used furniture because I can’t afford to “buy” my own. But I replaced all the plumbing in my house myself. I spent less than $1000 on materials. Every hour taken from my furniture-making was calamitous, but I can’t compete with the cost of a plumber, so I work less and plumb more, and earn less money. That means I spend even less in the marketplace, employ no one, and pay less in taxes. Wash, rinse, repeat all over the economy. A certain Harvard-educated lawyer will never understand, or more likely, doesn’t care about that concept. He’ll just tax the plumber more to make up the shortfall. Continually widening the gap between wages the plumber must command to stay legitimate, and the bills a Walmart greeter with a hot water heater that only supplies cold water all of a sudden can afford to pay, should get the economy humming in no time, huh?
Even Joe the Plumber, who isn’t “really a plumber” I’m told, and wouldn’t even be accepted at Harvard to unclog a toilet, understood that one, and in advance.
