The middle class does not exist. I understand that all our lives we have been taught to believe that, not only does a middle class exist, but we are that class. I propose that this class is a myth. This allegation can be proven with only a definition, a brief analysis of to what and whose benefit it was created, and why this ridiculousness is still flung around in every economic debate.

First, look to see what the term "Middle Class" means. First, the term "class" is assumed here to be short for "classification of persons, organized by economic status." Obviously. That means that the integral word here is "Middle." "Middle" means, herein, the center or average of any group. To have meaning, then, a "middle" requires an "upper" and a "lower." Most econo- mist agree that, previous to the Industrial Revolution (c. 1760-1860 in most Northern European nations and North America) there was no middle class. The upper class was known as the Aristocracy and the lower as the Serfs. These were easy to tell apart, because the Aristocracy owned everything, and the Serfs didn't. During the Age of Industry, the Merchant supposedly founded the Middle Class, or bourgeois, as those who had something, but not everything. Today, instead of the Merchant class, it is applied to all workers not in poverty. The division between the Merchant and the Aristocracy became hazy rapidly, but the gap was fairly existent between the Serfs, who still had nothing (and lots of it), the Aristocracy, who had quite a bit, and the Mer- chant, who had less, but still a fair surplus. It is from this group that we get the "Nouveau Riche", the Morgans, the Rockefellers, John Hancock; all of these were Middle Class, but would be upper today. Today, the term Middle Class is applied to any person above the poverty level, but below the level of the upper class. While the border is hard to locate, the division is clear. The rich are very rich, and the "lower class" are very poor, and the "middle class" are slightly less poor than the lower. If you compare the upper and lower class, however, the extremes balance considerably higher than the middle class. The effective point of balance is slightly less than poor. To define "Middle Class" operationally today, you would get a meaningless phrase reading something like "A Bit Less Starving Than The Really Poor People."

To bring about any New Order, however, someone has to benefit. Someone does benefit from the conception that the common man is not so common. Poli- ticians benefit from the ability to pacify their constituents by calling them middle class. Faith is put into the prosperity of any nation's economy, and, by conduction, into that nation's leaders, when it appears that most citizens are affluent. Therefore, incumbents benefit from telling their governed that they are Middle Class citizens. A challenger would be noticeably damaged, however, should he attempt to say to the voters that they were lower class citizens. The now insulted voters would, and the hopeful future office holder wouldn't. The other major group to benefit from the deluding of the people would be the Big Business. The small business owner, an admirable fellow about whom many things are written, just doesn't own a percentage of the market share to reflect the number out there. The statistics of failed small businesses each year is adequate testimony to where the average small business owner lies on the "Very Rich - Very Poor" axis. Somewhere above poverty, but not much higher than the break-even point. But the market places of this nation are busy. Where does all our money go? Take a look at your cassette or CD collection, look closely, and see who publishes the music. Skinny Puppy is on Nettwork and Alpha Team is on Strictly Hype, but most of the others, Geffen, Reprise, Atlantic, Sire, Paisley Park, are all subdivisions of Warner Brothers. Even Tommy Boy is half Warner at last I heard. Look at your tele- vision channels. CNN, CNN 2, TBS, TNT, etc. belong to Turner, and MTV, VH-1, ABC, FOX, Nickelodeon, Disney (!), etc. (as well as Pepsi and Pizza Hut, coincidentally) all belong to the same people. Most of the money in our nation today go to the Big Business. These are the Merchants of the Industri- al Age, and they are the Upper Class of today, as surely as the Borgias were in their day. A belief that they are just amalgams of Middle Class people distracts the people from the massive amounts of money at their disposal, and from the increasingly political role they are taking in this Lobbied and Multi-Nationaled time. (Remember recently when a Pakistani national shot a CIA man in DC during rush hour traffic? Well, that car held a couple of CIA men, their wives (I think), and a couple of AT&T employees...)

Why does this go on? What could lead the no-longer-looking-so-middle class to put up with this? Well, if we ignore the fact that the media doesn't do a very good job of releasing this data, and that our rich and our leaders have a vested interest in not publicizing this, we are left with the minds of the "middle class" themselves. If you tell a person he is pretty well off, he will be happy. If we just face it, the pride of the middle class is what leads to a belief in one. Much of the delusion is self-induced. Once we understand this, we can understand why the middle class is so low today. As each income bracket became fringe Middle Class, they (quite understandably) began to think of themselves as fully middle class people. This, though, made the next lower bracket fringe Middle Class, and the cycle continues. (Thus leading to the related phenomenon of the Upper Middle Class, aka the Richer- Not-So-Rich People, and, the most humorous, the Middle Middle Class, or the Not-So-Rich People of the Not-So-Rich People.) Hence, the Middle Class be- comes, not only meaningless, but believed by the people in general.

Therefore, the Middle Class does not exist. It is a myth created by those with something to gain, and believed by those with something to hide.