Share of Throat: Bastille Day Reflections

The last time around, we called them Robber Barons. Will Rogers was alive, broadcasting: “The difference between our rich and poor grows greater every year. Our distribution of wealth is getting more uneven all the time. A man can make a million and he is on every page in the morning. But it never tells you who gave up that million he got. You can’t get money without taking it from somebody.” And, “Ten men in the country could buy the world and ten million can’t buy enough to eat.”

We’ll begin with the crimes against humanity. In America today, poverty is the fourth leading cause of death. Hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, ten times more than categorical homicide. When a few hundred billionaires hoard wealth, the lack of which consistently and causatively kills an underclass, we ought to be well in the habit of calling out this murderous greed.

“Do you not know that numbers of your fellow-creatures are starving, for want of what you have too much of? You ought to have had the express and universal consent of mankind, before appropriating more of the common subsistence than you needed for your own maintenance.”  -Jean-Jacques Rousseau

(One may answer, it’s the government’s responsibility to provide a social safety net, not private citizens, and that could and should be true if the same billionaires were not in the habit of purchasing politicians and the judiciary to concentrate their wealth, power and control even further by lowering all associated taxes on the rich that could otherwise be humanely redistributed to ensure a maximal benefit to the populace. As they currently behave, billionaires have no such defense.)

We also should not be so naïve as to think that this is incidental. Such fortunes are rarely built on anything but rampant exploitation, curating a group all too happy to step on the faces of the workers on their way up. Rousseau knew, “if we have a few rich and powerful men on the pinnacle of fortune and grandeur, while the crowd grovels in want and obscurity, it is because the former prize what they enjoy only in so far as others are destitute of it; and because, without changing their condition, they would cease to be happy the moment the people ceased to be wretched.”

Almost two centuries later, Bertrand Russell noted the same pathological sadism that trumps even riches: “Marx held that politics is determined by economics, but that was because he was still under the influence of eighteenth-century rationalism, and imagined that what people most desire is to grow rich. Experience since his time has shown that there is something which people desire even more strongly, and that is to keep others poor.”

That’s thawed out raspberry juice from a darker time in our lives, I swear

One recent visitor to our tasting room, upon learning of our love of the guillotine which he presumably did not share, quipped that thirty dollar bottles of beer are obviously only for rich people. Our first point of response are these charming-yet-horrifying videos made by Humphrey Yang (and one inspired by his) to illustrate the unfathomable wealth of the ultrarich, for whom the guillotine lies in wait as their symbolic welcome mat to the underworld:

“The inescapable reality is this: wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence, so that some people imagine that it belongs to surreal or mysterious entities. That is why it is so essential to study capital and its distribution in a methodical, systematic way.” -Thomas Piketty

Other than our suffering, billionaires would love nothing more than our ignorant belief that the switch from M(illion) to B(illion) isn’t so dramatic. And that the switch from billion to 200-400 billion isn’t so dramatic. They relish the ongoing infighting in the working class: people resentful of their slightly richer friends and neighbors, disdainful of their slightly poorer friends and neighbors, all while they profit from our labor.

Were those ill-gotten gains to be redistributed to ensure a minimum of unnecessary poverty related death, we might enjoy a market in which we did not all feel ourselves so unequally yoked. Still, the point is taken! These are not and never have been and never will be quick cheap beers for high-volume mindless consumption. Even well into lambic’s backstory, Raf Meert’s research shows that the going rate for a 1L jug of lambic in 1790 & 1860 was about two hours of going-rate labor. With our ludicrously low federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr, sure, our prices are well north of that, but so are the wages we pay our workers (~$20/hr).

Tom Jacobs of Antidoot Wilde Fermenten aptly analyzed the predicament in a 2018 video: “It’s hard of course! In literature it’s called the William Morris Paradox. Labor as such is something good. And that’s why we have to put all our labor and love in the products that we make. We have to make crafty things, we have to make beautiful wallpapers, and beautiful tables, and beautiful furniture… But the problem was, the way he produced products, they got so expensive that only the owners of the factories could buy it. So in his anticapitalism he was making products that only the capitalists could buy. That’s a risk, I think, today, with craft products. And that’s something we hope to avoid. It’s small enough, so we hope to establish personal connections with people.”

On the opposite end of the production scale, you have the largest beverage companies rabidly demanding greater “share of throat,” their reduction of the human to the throat they hope to occupy. There is a finite number of throats—the conglomerate reasons—drinking a finite amount of liquid. Because the American is earth’s animal most susceptible to advertising of any quality whatsoever, the amount of liquid per throat can be grown substantially, and the type of liquid therein proportionally manipulated via ad spend. PepsiCo spends about 4 billion dollars a year to convince us to drink from their portfolio of sugar water, fake sugar water, and branded water. They no doubt also noticed that they could increase their share of throat if they could convince some adult humans to stop drinking their favorite fermented beverages since time immemorial on spuriously reductive health claims.

From our perspective, we’re not fighting over throat occupancy, we simply want people to be able to afford the beer we make, and when 90% of people’s discretionary spending evaporates to the top .01% who have more money than they could ever spend, that’s the “share of throat” we’re interested in returning to the people.

Billionaires have the same size throats as you and I; they tend not to drink a hundred thousand beers in a single day or eat three hundred thousand square meals a day at their local restaurants. So where that grotesquely disproportional money could be spent, making a difference in people’s lives, selling and serving and buying meaningful food and drink and wares and experiences that make life feel a little more connected and a little less dystopian, it’s instead concentrated into the oligarchy, never to be seen again: unless!

We would be remiss not to mention the necessary precursor of these levels of inequality to global fascism. If you know us from our leftness and militant opposition to the unabashed inhumanity of the right, know that only comes from first a place of wanting a more flourishing world for everyone. Writing in the 1950’s Bertrand Russell cautioned: “Fascism has now gone underground, but perhaps only temporarily. At any rate the fanatical disposition which produced it is ready to be called out by the same kind of circumstances. The Nazis got their hold on Germany owing to the misery produced by the great depression, which, itself, was caused by the fanatical folly of American reactionaries. If America were again to pursue as mad an economic policy as that of the ‘20’s, it is by no means impossible that correlative follies would again be generated in other countries.” By now, with global fascism 2.0 directly on the heels of the same runaway inequality, we can pretty safely upgrade “correlative” to “causative” and “follies” to “evil”.

Taxing the rich is the answer to literally every bad faith whining, “but how will we pay for it?” when improvements to society are suggested. Taxing the rich will never negatively affect your life, it will never even negatively affect the lives of billionaires, it will save the lives of millions, and improve the lives of billions. If they refuse to be so taxed, there is gravity’s favorite blade, recourse of the dispossessed masses.

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