Do we really need billionaires?

 As someone who works in a town where trickle down economics drives most of its economy, I see its benefits and the clear boundary beyond which it never flows.

The luminaries of Wolfeboro and Tuftonboro don't give a crap what happens to Ossipee, Effingham, Brookfield, New Durham... Communities with frontage on Lake Winnipesaukee attract wealthy homebuyers. Some of the families have invested in businesses that exploit the other lakes in surrounding areas. Those water bodies don't attract the A-list. They're just good for cash flow. The real life takes place overlooking The Big Lake.

Subtract the billionaires and millionaires, and what do the lakefront towns have to offer in a reality-based economy? The English monarchy no longer needs masts for its sailing ships. Water-powered mills went out more than a century ago. The stony soil is hard to farm. The roads have to wind over and around steep little mountains, and skirt the shores of numerous lakes. Transporting manufactured goods takes longer than in places with straighter highways and easier grades.

Building up a modern economy would mean destroying the quaintness and natural beauty that attract tourists and seasonal residents. Residential development is already doing that, along with the retail sprawl that follows. The state might build up its intellectual economy, but tech jobs seem to be targets of AI. There won't be much left but retail clerk and food service jobs, and those depend on having a decent amount of people around who can afford to buy things and eat out. Oh, and retail is increasingly conducted online now.

Visitors buy things on impulse and necessity, and locals try to support local businesses, but the local businesses themselves have trouble sourcing their products because online retailers feed upstream from their suppliers, driving costs up and margins down, as well as sometimes cleaning out the supply chain completely. Online retailers have a fraction of the overhead that brick and mortar stores do. Massive giants like WalMart can buy with the budget of a small country, effortlessly outbidding a small country store.

There were seasonal residents before there were billionaires. Indeed, fairly average, upper middle class people used to be able to afford camps and cottages to come and rough it for a few weeks every summer. People generally got along fine without soaring, glass-fronted palaces listing for millions of dollars. The boom in the 1980s that ushered in that era drove most of the modest cottage owners out of the area because they couldn't afford the tax hikes that came along with the spike in real estate valuation. It's only gotten worse from there.

It doesn't help that New Hampshire derives most of its tax revenue from property taxes. It was a good scam when seasonal residents shut down their places in early fall and only needed someone to snowshoe in occasionally to check on them through the off season. The more people who live here year-round the more services they need, including some sort of schooling for the young 'uns. Also, the more elaborate the homes, the more care and feeding they might need when the lords of the manor are absent. It drives municipal costs higher for fire departments among other things.

The real estate boom of the 1980s led to a population boom as new residents flocked in to build and maintain the new homes and condos. While much of the new construction went to seasonal residences, the surge required year-round personnel to make sure that everything was ready when the owners arrived. That meant more families with kids in the schools. That meant higher taxes. A collapsing economy would mean more people moving away if they could.

Already, fewer people visit than we saw in the 1990s. Traffic still gets snarled, because the road system was never designed for this kind of population. New England frugality combined with difficult terrain to produce only as many roads as they absolutely needed. Main Street is a numbered state highway. It's actually two state highways that meet at Pickering Corner and turn north for a few miles as Center Street before separating to their separate terminations. Route 28 comes all the way up from southern New Hampshire. A traveler on it could have been driving for a couple of hours already before getting wedged into South Main Street in little ol' Wolfeboro. Route 109 runs from Maine coast sort of east-west to Sandwich, NH. They will always funnel travelers through the center of town. Maybe some of them give up and park long enough to spend money. Or they just crawl along in their air conditioned capsules, maybe taking in the sights, maybe hating every minute. Who knows?

The town has become a center for retirees who can afford it. I would say rich retirees, but where is the threshold of richness? When everyone rode simple, affordable mountain bikes, I had a better sense of the number and ages of children in the area. They might not all buy their bikes from our shop, but we did have the best service department for miles. I don't know what they do now, because we almost never see them. I saw a dip in the school population in Effingham for a couple of years, but that seems to have rebounded. People move to the more obscure communities of Carroll County for their own reasons, like establishing a sovereign citizen compound or taking a shot at homesteading. As homeschooling has grown, institutional enrollment may not reflect the number of families and their offspring. People are around. I don't know all the ways in which they finance it.

Traditional industries include logging and sand and gravel mining. The area has trees and lots of glacial till. One pit complex has its own rail line directly to Boston. Those piles of sand and gravel you see when you pull into North Station on the Downeaster came from Ossipee. Neat, huh? However, shipping the actual substance of your state to another state is ultimately not sustainable.

One rich person is actually a colony of symbiotic organisms feeding off of the wealth assigned to that individual. This is supposed to be the justification for trickle-down economics as the primary model for the distribution of money, but it only goes as far as the personal interests of the named owner. It might work if rich people were perfectly evenly distributed across the country, but they aren't and they can't be. The rich person's discretionary spending goes to the things they like. Our shop happens to have a few wealthy people, both seasonal and local, who like various aspects of what we offer. As time goes by, succeeding generations feel less affection and obligation, meaning that our time as a favored business will fade. It's already happening. The theme park buyers have much more enthusiasm for the little bakery and the boatyard.

To some extent, that's just life. A business has to evolve with the generations as they come along. We're already so old and creaky that the younger generation of riders writes us off without a second thought. We have no representative among them as we did in the 1990s. Someone might buy the name and the tools, and make the business relevant again, but it won't be the same business. Cross-country skiing is even more endangered than road riding in the age of climate and economic collapse. People need money and motivation to want to do laps on a short course of snowmaking in the increasingly common winters when nature does not provide. I have my gear, but I couldn't afford to update it. I wouldn't trudge around that loop on my back-country gear. Well, maybe I would just for exercise during the work week, but if I'm going to trudge I will more likely just go for a hike on my day off.

The world is changing. The economy is changing. Ordinary people have less money, young people have different ideas how to spend what they have, and there aren't enough handy billionaires to take up the slack. We will never be where we were in the 1990s, feeling confident and well funded and full of unfounded hope. The middle class I grew up in was a sustained illusion. The devices that projected that illusion fell apart as the century ended. Don't look back and fall for the bullshit about how a whole family could be supported on one income in the 1950s and '60s, because that was already based on unsustainable factors. Look at the current data and figure out how to do the best we can for the people alive now, and inevitably joining us.

We will die competing for big shares of it. We will die trying to squeeze profit out of every product and service. I don't mean in the sense that "everybody dies." I mean soon, and nastily. Some people are fine with that. Assholes like that have driven our thinking for far too long. They're the ones promoting fossil fuels, reviving colonialist thinking, and making excuses for wars of territorial expansion. They're the ones who have been stockpiling guns in the United States since the 1980s, and lulling themselves to sleep with fantasies of the glorious civil war they're going to have. Because this country has a surfeit of both assholes and guns, they are a political force to be reckoned with, but that doesn't mean by fighting them on their own terms. It won't go well for them, but it will be bloody and waste a lot of decent people's lives. That's how these wars always go.

Unlimited wealth, unlimited liberty, and unlimited personal armament are not ingredients for a pleasant future. While a majority of people might partake responsibly, we are seeing in our lives right now how a minority can use the leverage of money, the threat of force, and a lack of empathy to put survival at risk and make life difficult for everyone.

Waste is not just a personal choice

 I'm cleaning up e-bikes for a very wealthy customer. They need parts replaced because of careless maintenance and poor storage. I was told by their property caretaker that the bikes are fairly new. The parts aren't worn. They're corroded. Brake rotors deeply pitted. Aluminum parts beginning to bubble their paint as white blisters of oxide form underneath it. Chains rusted to rebar.

As the bike industry has suffered shrinkage that was largely self-induced, merging with economic setbacks related to the pandemic, and end-stage capitalism in general, I have less and less patience for the rich and feckless who don't have respect and care for their toys. I compare these bikes to that of a worker who literally rode his ebike to pieces, using it as transportation through the New England winter. I resent the grimy task of trying to remedy rich people's neglect. I will charge them. They will pay. They always have. But, while we wait for parts, their 50-pound pigs are cluttering up the shop's limited storage space.

They waste equipment because they can: a trivial write-off that they excuse because they can afford it. They're creating jobs. But they're also wasting manufactured objects that may be in short supply. They're spitting on the labor that went into making their bikes in the first place -- labor that they wasted by taking crappy care of machines that someone else might have wanted and been able to put to good use.

The brake rotors they need are not in stock right now at our supplier. I will piece together something out of our stock, just to get the bikes out of our way, but that means that anyone who shows up right afterward, while we're still waiting for replacement stock, will not get a quick turnaround, even if they depend on their bike to get them to their subsistence job.

Two of the mounting bolts of the rear brake rotor on one of the bikes are rusted into the hub. The hub is the motor housing. The rotor is heavily rusted. Worst case, they have to buy a whole wheel because the bolts won't come out, but can't be trusted to stay in after all of the efforts to remove them. Drilling them out would require perfect precision to remove only the old bolt without damaging the bolt hole. If threads needed to be repaired, it would require a skilled machine shop, not just a hand tap, because the holes are shallow and blind.

This isn't a metaphor for the destructiveness of wealth. It's a flat-out demonstration of it. The attitude became prevalent in the 1980s, as we accelerated away from the early surge of the environmental movement and our flirtation with social consciousness based around the gains of the civil rights and women's movements, and the anti-war sentiments stimulated by the Vietnam War. The pursuit of personal wealth became the main focus of society. The sole measure of whether you should do something was whether you could pay for it. You didn't even need the money, as long as you could get the credit approved. That, incidentally, is why the economy collapsed at the end of the decade, ushering in the 1990s on a recession. Eventually you run out of places to transfer your balance, and actually have to pay something.

Economy is hard. We have unemployment when more people need jobs than jobs need people. We make poor provisions for the players on the bench, because we tend not to think of them as such. We just hope they're still alive and functional when we need to put them in the game. An actual pro team pays those reserves. Not the free market, though. Social safety nets are stigmatized. Employers know that people are busily manufacturing more people, so someone will be around for the next call-up. Industrialization views people as interchangeable parts. Life is cheap and individuals are common.

The winners in the economy take what they want of land, possessions, experiences, and delegate as much as possible of the grubby chores. Their contribution to the economy consists of the money they didn't pay to some laborers, redirected to as little as they can get away with paying to selected other laborers. What are their actual job skills, and why are they worth that much to the rest of us? It's an honest question.

I value real services provided by people who might not have to exert much or get physically dirty in the course of a work day. I can still ask what's fair on a basis other than "whatever the market will bear." The market is driven by marketing. What if things we've been conditioned to condone as lucrative are complete bullshit? I'll bet you can think of a few. I know I can. But only an impossibly detailed audit could disclose all of them and devise a genuinely fair pay scale.

Down here in the middle and lower reaches of the current income scale, we tend to hire each other to do things for which we personally don't have the tools and knowledge. Pure self sufficiency is a myth. It doesn't even exist at the level of photosynthesis. All of life depends on some kind of external input. The higher you go on the income scale, the more you find people who can delegate everything, providing only money and demanding satisfaction.

The level of demand varies widely. People with only one billion dollars look up the steep face of the mountain above them to the lofty heights where the multi-billionaires live and feel like they're one of us little people. Billionaires are people too. They're just as capable of expressing appreciation, even as some scrabbling dubs can be real jerks about paying for services rendered. I could tell you stories... But even as I recall a few, I realize that they're based on a sense of economic asymmetry. We were the richie rich bike shop in the richie rich lakeside town, and the customer was a hardworking dirt digger from that place between the luxury of the lakeshore and the tourist dollars of the mountains: a no-man's land where even the glaciers just dropped their junk and left all life to fend as best it could on scraped rock, gravel, and sand.

This particular time presents a new level of challenge, with the economic policies of the current regime and the unrest associated with the threat posed by their authoritarian governing style. The bike business already suffered from a number of ongoing forces bent on squeezing us into a smaller and smaller social and economic space. Biking in general suffered from the industry's attempts to create consumer dependency. Now all of those struggles wiggle through the obstacles presented by a drop in tourism, and reduced spending by consumers in general.

We still see people who seem oblivious to the instability. Consumer confidence is supposedly low, but some of the individual consumers who show up to spend seem almost dangerously manic. By and large, people buying things ask the same questions that they always have. Buying a bike, they ask about its features and benefits. Getting a bike repaired, they ask if it's worth fixing, and how much it will cost. They're little islands of normality scattered through days where hours pass without a phone call or a customer coming in. It's in those hours and silences that we see the effects of uncertainty.

Repairs are trickling in. Usually they flood as soon as the weather gets warm. The warmth has not come on in a steady rise, but the waves of chill are shorter and more above freezing. It's been years since we had a "normal" bike season. Those years depended on circumstances that will never be repeated. So we feel our way. We try to be ready for customer needs...and wants...