Does anyone read Edward Bellamy anymore?  I hope so, and not just as a quaint Victorian utopian novelist.  The right generally hates him, which means he must be right about a lot.  Else why try to paint him as a Nazi?  Bellamy Clubs may have called themselves National Clubs, but with members like William Dean Howells they could hardly be anything but respectable.

Bellamy's Magnum Opus, Looking Backward was prescient in so many ways.  It may have come to my mind because we're changing the clocks tonight, or maybe because the Robber Barons of High Finance have been excusing extravagant salaries and bonuses as necessary to force the poor, poor, CEOs to keep their shoulders to the wheel and their noses to the grindstone, no matter how hard it is to do anything productive in that contorted posture.

Bellamy's vision of 2000 from the vantage point of 1887 had some interesting observations to make.  For example, Julian West, the protagonist tries to explain how someone could live as a social parasite, something which 2000 would never countenance:

    I myself was rich and also educated, and possessed, therefore, all the elements of happiness enjoyed by the most fortunate in that age. Living in luxury, and occupied only with the pursuit of the pleasures and refinements of life, I derived the means of my support from the labor of others, rendering no sort of service in return. My parents and grand-parents had lived in the same way, and I expected that my descendants, if I had any, would enjoy a like easy existence.

    But how could I live without service to the world? you ask. Why should the world have supported in utter idleness one who was able to render service? The answer is that my great-grandfather had accumulated a sum of money on which his descendants had ever since lived. The sum, you will naturally infer, must have been very large not to have been exhausted in supporting three generations in idleness. This, however, was not the fact. The sum had been originally by no means large. It was, in fact, much larger now that three generations had been supported upon it in idleness, than it was at first. This mystery of use without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems like magic, but was merely an ingenious application of the art now happily lost but carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of shifting the burden of one's support on the shoulders of others.

Bellamy proceeds to make his famous comparison of the world to a gigantic coach, with few riders and many pulling the coach along a rough and steep path.  The few rich mime sympathy for the many poor during times of special stress, and "at such times the passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope, exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of possible compensation in another world for the hardness of their lot, while others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and injured. It was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach should be so hard to pull, and there was a sense of general relief when the specially bad piece of road was gotten over. This relief was not, indeed, wholly on account of the team, for there was always some danger at these bad places of a general overturn in which all would lose their seats".

Yet the true sentiments of the select riders were that they were riding because they were of superior stock.  Nothing could be done, and to do more that utter a pious expression that such was a shame was a waste of time and sympathy.  Besides there was a

    ...singular hallucination which those on the top of the coach generally shared, that they were not exactly like their brothers and sisters who pulled at the rope, but of finer clay, in some way belonging to a higher order of beings who might justly expect to be drawn. This seems unaccountable, but, as I once rode on this very coach and shared that very hallucination, I ought to be believed. The strangest thing about the hallucination was that those who had but just climbed up from the ground, before they had outgrown the marks of the rope upon their hands, began to fall under its influence. As for those whose parents and grand-parents before them had been so fortunate as to keep their seats on the top, the conviction they cherished of the essential difference between their sort of humanity and the common article was absolute. The effect of such a delusion in moderating fellow feeling for the sufferings of the mass of men into a distant and philosophical compassion is obvious. To it I refer as the only extenuation I can offer for the indifference which, at the period I write of, marked my own attitude toward the misery of my brothers.

(Memo to self-refrain from quoting huge blocks of text, no matter how delicious they seem.)

(Second memo to self-wouldn't it be nice to sit Rick Santelli down and read this passage to him at about 98 decibels).

Is there any doubt that Bellamy had the Republican meme down pat,-the moral hazard folks who care about everyone else's moral hazard except their own?  Nicely prescient, Mr. B.  

Bellamy was also pretty prescient about the bailout of the giants of corporate finance-though he didn't separate them from industrial corporations.  Much as the corporations decried help to the lowly (like mortgage holders), they were quite willing to muzzle down at the government trough themselves.

    The records of the period show that the outcry against the concentration of capital was furious. Men believed that it threatened society with a form of tyranny more abhorrent than it had ever endured. They believed that the great corporations were preparing for them the yoke of a baser servitude than had ever been imposed on the race, servitude not to men but to soulless machines incapable of any motive but insatiable greed. Looking back, we cannot wonder at their desperation, for certainly humanity was never confronted with a fate more sordid and hideous than would have been the era of corporate tyranny which they anticipated.

    Meanwhile, without being in the smallest degree checked by the clamor against it, the absorption of business by ever larger monopolies continued. In the United States there was not, after the beginning of the last quarter of the century, any opportunity whatever for individual enterprise in any important field of industry, unless backed by a great capital. During the last decade of the century, such small businesses as still remained were fast-failing survivals of a past epoch, or mere parasites on the great corporations, or else existed in fields too small to attract the great capitalists. Small businesses, as far as they still remained, were reduced to the condition of rats and mice, living in holes and corners, and counting on evading notice for the enjoyment of existence. The railroads had gone on combining till a few great syndicates controlled every rail in the land. In manufactories, every important staple was controlled by a syndicate. These syndicates, pools, trusts, or whatever their name, fixed prices and crushed all competition except when combinations as vast as themselves arose. Then a struggle, resulting in a still greater consolidation, ensued. The great city bazar crushed it country rivals with branch stores, and in the city itself absorbed its smaller rivals till the business of a whole quarter was concentrated under one roof, with a hundred former proprietors of shops serving as clerks. Having no business of his own to put his money in, the small capitalist, at the same time that he took service under the corporation, found no other investment for his money but its stocks and bonds, thus becoming doubly dependent upon it.

Sounds a wee bit like the last year, maybe just?  Bellamy's theories are too closely argued to do them justice like this.  Read the book.  It's free at Project Gutenberg (an idea of which Bellamy would certainly have approved.  One more point and then to supper.

What about the question of reward for labor?  Here, Bellamy makes an intriguing suggestion: reward enjoyable work with longer hours and tedious work with shorter hours.  Enjoyment is, of course, a matter of temperament and interest, so take care to help everyone find his/her niche with universal education.  But beyond that, Bellamy questions whether wages are really the prime motivation for working at all:

    "Does it then really seem to you," answered my companion, "that human nature is insensible to any motives save fear of want and love of luxury, that you should expect security and equality of livelihood to leave them without possible incentives to effort? Your contemporaries did not really think so, though they might fancy they did. When it was a question of the grandest class of efforts, the most absolute self-devotion, they depended on quite other incentives. Not higher wages, but honor and the hope of men's gratitude, patriotism and the inspiration of duty, were the motives which they set before their soldiers when it was a question of dying for the nation, and never was there an age of the world when those motives did not call out what is best and noblest in men. And not only this, but when you come to analyze the love of money which was the general impulse to effort in your day, you find that the dread of want and desire of luxury was but one of several motives which the pursuit of money represented; the others, and with many the more influential, being desire of power, of social position, and reputation for ability and success. So you see that though we have abolished poverty and the fear of it, and inordinate luxury with the hope of it, we have not touched the greater part of the motives which underlay the love of money in former times, or any of those which prompted the supremer sorts of effort. The coarser motives, which no longer move us, have been replaced by higher motives wholly unknown to the mere wage earners of your age. Now that industry of whatever sort is no longer self-service, but service of the nation, patriotism, passion for humanity, impel the worker as in your day they did the soldier. The army of industry is an army, not alone by virtue of its perfect organization, but by reason also of the ardor of self-devotion which animates its members.

Don't be too put off by the military tone.  Bellamy's army metaphor looks to the Civil War.  Many of his readers were veterans-now working in Pullman's or Carnegie's or Rockefeller's "army."

Perhaps Joe Biden was channeling Bellamy just a bit in his speech accepting the Vice Presidential nomination.  

    You know, I believe the measure of a man isn't just the road he's traveled; it's the choices he's made along the way. Barack Obama could have done anything after he graduated from college. With all his talent and promise, he could have written his ticket to Wall Street. But that's not what he chose to do. He chose to go to Chicago. The South Side. There he met men and women who had lost their jobs. Their neighborhood was devastated when the local steel plant closed. Their dreams deferred. Their dignity shattered. Their self-esteem gone.

    And he made their lives the work of his life. That's what you do when you've been raised by a single mom, who worked, went to school and raised two kids on her own. That's how you come to believe, to the very core of your being, that work is more than a paycheck. It's dignity. It's respect. It's about whether you can look your children in the eye and say: we're going to be ok.

If so, it takes me a long way toward forgiving him for the Bankruptcy Bill.  So, with the extra hour of daylight we have tomorrow, I commend Bellamy to your reading.  I hope you all love your jobs as much as I love mine, and treat those who can't imagine staying on their jobs without multi-million dollar bonuses with the proper mixture of pity and contempt.