The story is drilled deeply into our collective societal conscious. Happy school kid walking to school, backpack on their shoulder, without a care in the world. The sun shines its golden rays and the world is good and right. The gentle jingle of coins tinkles in their pocket with the promise of a delicious hot lunch at school. And then a sun blotting scourge appears, casting a shaft of darkness and fear on the sun child world. A bully gruffly demands it’s pound of flesh from the passing school kid.
“Gimme your lunch money kid! Or I’ll pound ya!”
Faced with a horrible choice not of his choosing the child has to decided between two evils. To get beat up or to have lunch. Most kids of course, being short-sighted and focused on short-term gain, choose the lesser of two evils. They avoid the pain and suffering of being beat up and humiliated now by trading away their future lunch. They give the bully their lunch money. Typically the bully still does a little beating just to ensure the victim knows who is boss. The school kid trudges off to school, more beaten down, less confident, more afraid, less sure of their rightness and soon far more hungry.
Now it’s lunch time. But the lunch money that the school kid started out with is no longer theirs. Their lunch has been redistributed to the bully class. The school kid has two choices: They can either go hungry or they can rely on the largess of their immediate society and scavenge leftover pieces of lunch from the rest of non bully school society.
The bully loves this system. The bully has built a remarkably efficient wealth redistribution system. Other people go out and get the money. The bully class builds a system that ensures the money only goes one way: up to them. They toss out tiny crumbs of false hope with nonsense about how some of it will trickle down when they hire some of the victims to do random tasks for them. The bully class is surrounded by goons and gawkers who slavishly continue the fallacy and build their power base.
This continues in an unbroken cycle until one mythical day the school kid realizes that their short-term thinking and bully acquiescence is hurting them far more than any mere physical beating ever could. That day dawns like any other day. The backpack is slung the same. The lunch money jingles the same as always. The bully approaches the victim with confidence and almost complete disinterest. But this time when he grumbles “Gimme your lunch money kid.” The kid snaps and decides enough is enough. They decide they aren’t going to have their damn lunch money stolen anymore.
The school kid decides that it is BETTER to be beaten up and injured than to continuously give the bully their lunch money. The kid is sick and tired of being forced by the bully system into needing to have a free lunch. The kid says No. The Bully has his goons beat the kid up and takes the money anyway. But the kid fought back and the bully realizes it’s not worth it. Eventually the school kid wins the “right” to have his lunch moneys they no longer need to rely on “free lunch.”
I am really tired of well-meaning people trot out the tired logical fallacy of “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
That’s utter bullshit because obviously there is no such thing as a free lunch. It tosses up a red herring disguised as a straw man, masquerading as a logical triumph.
The question to ask is not, is there such a thing as a free lunch (no), but more importantly why do we now need a free lunch? Which bully stole our lunch money so that now we need free lunch? That’s the real question, not the oligarchically prescribed “no such thing as a free lunch” bullshit. It’s not about free lunch it’s about lunch and lunch money. And who took the lunch money.
I’m in favor of a strategic bully-stolen lunch-money redistribution-plan. Give me back my damn lunch money you bankster thieves!
So many of us allow ourselves to be bamboozled by trickster “common sense” styled falsities. Simple answers to complex problems. We take the relatively true idea that “There ain’t no free lunch!” and allow vested interest bullies to morph that into a logical fallacy that implies that the school kid who arrives to school with no lunch money is a lazy, good for nothing free loader. That the poor school kid who doesn’t have lunch money anymore is trying to scam a free lunch because they “want something for nothing.”
What we want is our damn lunch money back. What we want is for the financial bullies to stop taking our lunch money. They tell us that we should be happy to give all our money to the “creator class” who is bigger and wiser and smarter and richer than we are so they know how to manage our money. They know “how the system works.” They know better than we do and will eventually trickle some of their wealth back down to us.
That stupid lie didn’t work in grade school and it hasn’t worked in the last 35 years of trickle down bully economics. Trickle down economics is bully economics and true wealth distribution upwards. It takes the wealth generated by the working people (the only place wealth and value are truly created) and forcibly distributes it upwards to the bankster bullies.
At some point enough of us will rise up and say Enough is enough! And not only refuse to give the bullies our lunch money but refuse the relegation of
needing a free lunch. I for one have had enough and I’m not willing to take it anymore.
If you want to read a great article about the last 35 years and how we allowed ourselves to get into this mess read this.
