February 23, 2011 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • Page 15 those are pretty good odds. The hated middle class that gave Marx a brief plausibility still exists in a circumscribed form, but not to the extent that it existed during the 19th century in Western Europe. Most of the European nations of today have reached a balance between non-communist socialism and investment capitalism, and few people there are plotting a Fifth Column uprising in support of a Russian invasion. Most of them are far more worried about the fact that European whites aren’t replicating strongly enough to maintain their pension systems. That’s a real problem, especially in France – but it’s not our problem, and should not become our problem. We never colonized Algeria or Morocco. Our problem is America. America may indeed be the bastion of the middle class, and that’s because in America almost everybody thinks of himself or herself as middle class. In America, being middle class means you have a job, but have to work until you’re old. That’s about all it means. People who live in rented urban apartments and don’t own a car consider themselves middle class because they subsist on wages rather than welfare. People with vacation homes and million-dollar bank accounts or stock portfolios seem to believe they’re just regular everyday Americans. We need to define the middle class before we can save it. Vance Packard was kinder and gentler than Marx. While he was a mild social critic, he had no homicidal intentions based on race, religion, or income. He was a gentleman to his fingertips. Packard wrote in his 1950s best-sellers that there were six social classes in America, each of them bifurcated into “upper” and “lower” levels. He said the “upper upper class” was inaccessible to outsiders, no matter how bright they might be or how hard they worked, because the “upper upper class” had to have inherited most of their money. No brain surgeon or high-ticket attorney could crash this club because – contrary to Horatio Alger stories – the rich guy was at least mildly disgraced by having earned his own money. The “lower upper class” consisted of people who earned their own millions in ways that were generally honest. The “upper middle class” consisted of the top physicians, attorneys, professors, engineers, and accountants. The lower middle class consisted of white-collar people in the public sector and small business people with family businesses. The upper lower class included skilled tradesman, blue-collar union workers, and public employees. The lower lower class included people on public assistance before retirement age, the marginally employed, and those involved in illicit activities. Packard didn’t impose any harsh moral judgments along with his stratification, except perhaps on the outright criminals. He pointed out that it was nobody’s fault if he or she wasn’t born rich, and also offered tables indicating that the differences between the upper professions, the lower professions, the skilled trades, and the labor jobs correlated with IQ. With a shrug toward Marx and a nod toward Packard, we can point out that there is one criterion for permanent membership in the middle class: ownership of property. People who own their own homes, at least in places like Northwest Bergen County, can safely be assumed to be somewhere in the flexible boundaries of the American middle class. If they are multiple property owners, they’re probably never going to become a drain on the taxpayers. California is a monument to the concept that high wages and non-ownership of property is an alternative, but it’s a very shaky monument. However offensive it may be to closet Marxists, property ownership – not the degree of one’s formal education – is the single guarantee of stability in an economy now shifting drastically to adjust to the collapse of a lot of high-ticket investment houses and the exportation of a large part of the manufacturing base. The implication is clear: Confiscatory property taxes that drive people out of the communities they love and helped to build are unacceptable. People may scream and rant to defend school spending so their kids continue to get sweetheart grades from grateful teachers. They may support those municipal public services outside the schools that benefit them personally. (Anyone for a commuter bus that doesn’t pay for itself? Over the side!) In the end, those who keep demanding special-interest tax spending may be able to do what a mountebank like Marx never could. They may have destroyed the middle class, however we define it, which provides a matrix for honest government and a support network that mandates a fair minimum wage and doesn’t allow people to starve or freeze, but doesn’t attempt to promise them an Ivy League education or a safe but non-productive government job. Reductions can be done by outsourcing or they can be done with voluntary acceptance of excessive salaries and needless activities. But they absolutely have to be done. It’s time for people to bite the strap and stop biting the hand that feeds them. If excessive taxes drive the shopkeepers, the skilled workers, the pensioners, and the multiple property owners out of Northwest Bergen, there will be no one left who can pay for anything. The great drama of the 20th century was the battle against communism, the system that had vowed the destruction of Christianity and of the middle class. Christmas Day 2011 will mark the 20th anniversary of the official dissolution of the Soviet Union, and thus the last real chance the communists had for world conquest and domination. The Chinese, the other main chance, are such eager capitalists that they’re putting traditional capitalists out of business. The Russians are still sorting out what happened, but they’re no threat unless we are foolish enough to beat up on them. Many of them actually like us, even if they think we’re naive. In Russia, Christianity is resurgent and capitalism is emergent. Broken statues of Marxist-Leninist heroes and Soviet supermen are waiting to be recycled. What a relief! Meanwhile, back in the nation that provided some of the soldiers and most of the tax money for the final eclipse of communism, the middle class, is being destroyed – by our own government? That’s how it looks. America is becoming less and less like the American Dream all the time, and we no longer have a major world power to blame. Communism in pragmatic terms was about control, and the communists attempted to use hatred of the middle class as a fulcrum to bring about their own control of the nations they dominated. None of the original communist leaders was an ethnic Russian, and none aspired to work in a factory or on a farm. They were after power, and they got it through rampant dishonesty and large numbers of murders, sometimes of whole ethnic groups. Alexander Ginsburg, a Russian dissident, once told me the Soviet government had murdered 60 million of its own citizens. Think about that number. This is not a system we want to emulate. Why hate the middle class? When Karl Marx defined the middle class, he was using the European term, not what we in America think of as middle class. The European middle class of the 1840s meant the emergent manufacturers who controlled the new factories that drew the peasantry away from the farms and turned them into underpaid, underfed industrial workers who couldn’t afford to eat, let alone invest. The factory-owning middle class of Marx’s time was a convenient target for working-class wrath. Their smug indifference to the sufferings their get-rich-quick attitude inflicted on the workers was insufferable. Marx lived by sponging on his best friend’s invested capital. People who knew Marx, including some serious revolutionaries, found him utterly preposterous. He never actually earned a living from anything he did. He and his doting wife, the snobbish, febrile daughter of an AngloGerman nobleman, outlived five of their six children. That suggests they weren’t very good at parenting either. His tedious writings have a vast appeal to intellectuals with other axes to grind, and his posthumous popularity saved him, temporarily, from what Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher called “the ash heap of history” until 20 years ago. You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, as Lincoln said, and Who is destroying the middle class? Midland Park Police Department Report On Feb. 10, a business owner reported to Detective John Gibbons that a former employee stole and cashed a business check. The business owner stated that he fired the employee, a 54-year-old Blauvelt, New York female, in mid-December. On Feb. 3, he discovered she cashed the check in the amount of $4,000. The case is under investiga- tion. Also on Feb. 10, a Chamberlain Place resident reported to Det. Gibbons that her husband either lost his credit card or it was stolen. She stated that someone had used the card at a convenience store and withdrew $81.75. The matter is under investigation. Godwin Avenue monopole (continued from page 5) that DAS setups are very expensive, difficult to implement, and difficult to maintain. “A macrocell is much easier to do,” he said. “It’s one pole, one set of equipment.” He said DAS does work. “In fact, you’ve undoubtedly used a DAS system if you’ve driven through a tunnel going to New York City. Because those are, in effect, are a DAS system. It’s a leaky co-ax type of DAS system, but it basically provides coverage in a very limited tube or space.” Graiff said DAS is used in confined area such as shopping malls or sports arenas where there are high concentrations of people where they cannot put up a macrocell. He noted that MetroPCS is using DAS in New York, adding that the company had to comply with a local ordinance that required new systems to utilize DAS technology. “They didn’t go willy-nilly and say we’re going to implement a DAS system because we think they’re great. They kind of had to do it,” Graiff said. “I thought the size of the cell and the gap (in Midland Park) was significant enough that it would be best handled by a macrocell,” he added, “and so I never even talked to you about…DAS.” The applicants had originally filed separate applications for 90-foot towers, with T-Mobil seeking permission for its antenna in the parking lot of the adjacent building at 44 Godwin Avenue. The board recommended the joint venture. The board also recommended increasing the height of the structure to accommodate four, or possibly five, colocators instead of two if the application is approved.