Household Economics: Where’s my $200K?

At some point, you coalesce sensation into a concept of identity. You are something and you are not other things. You are what you can control and you cannot control anything outside yourself. You cannot even control most of what happens inside what you consider to be you. You are servant to your respiration, your heartbeat, your bowels, and you have little control over them. Yet you consider your skin and everything it contains to be “you.” Everything outside that perimeter is “not you.”

As a creature, you have come to accept the requirement to absorb that which is not you in order to continue living. You must take in air rich in oxygen and expel air rich in carbon dioxide. If you fail to take in air or expel air for even a few minutes, your body will fail and consciousness will cease. The same is true if you fail to take in liquid for as little as a week, or fail to take in food for as little as a month, or fail to take shelter for as little as three hours.

None of the things you need in order to survive are yours. You must take that which is not you, convert it to you, and discharge the byproduct. You are essentially conditioned to this ritual from birth. By the time you achieve consciousness, you have become resigned to the rituals of eating, drinking, sleeping, shitting and peeing. It takes much longer to realize that your food, water and shelter is not yours, belongs to someone else, and you are expected to pay for it with your labor.

There is no household where children are not expected to contribute effort in exchange for support. Even Helen Keller had chores, as something is expected from everyone in return for the provision of the basics required to live. Most of a household’s efforts go into providing the food, water, and shelter required to sustain life and everyone in a household is expected to contribute what they can.

As the fifth child of nine, I was born into a large household with established rules of behavior, seniority, rank, privileges, expectations, responsibilities, and punishments. Pain is a way to become aware of you. After you experience hunger or abandonment, you become painfully aware your body has needs. Before I even became conscious of my identity, I became aware of the pain of being spanked, pinched, scratched, bitten, and hit. This is how the infant me formed a concept of my body.

I had chores before I knew what chores were. Of course I eagerly wanted to participate in whatever activity my siblings were doing; I never considered it work. If you could hold things you could be useful, and you often got to share in chores like getting stuff out and putting stuff away. I was taught how to change diapers at the age of three.

It takes years to understand that you are being subsidized by your parents and you’re expected to “do your part.” I was likely getting an allowance at the age of four. Once money enters into a child’s consciousness, everything changes. A monetary value could be calculated for all the food and beverages you consume; all of it cost money, none of it was free. This guilt, this stone, was laid upon me as a child: that I consumed more than I contributed and I would unlikely ever be able to pay back what I took.

My Mother did not demand a certain amount of effort so much as a certain attitude. When she asked you to do something, you did it, you did not ask why. Obedience was required and enforced by my Father who would inflict corporal punishment at the slightest sign of disrespect for my Mother. Fortunately, before I hit puberty, my Mother staged a coup and took over all authority for corporal punishment from my Father. After that, I didn’t fear my Father so much as I feared my Mother unleashing my Father, which she sometimes did.

Because there were so many of us, property seemed somewhat communal growing up. Most of my clothes were hand-me-downs from my older two brothers on their way to my younger two brothers. Shoes, boots, galoshes, cleats, jackets, coats, ice skates and bumbershoots were all somewhat communal. At first, your room isn’t your room, your bed is not your bed, none of the furnishings are yours. You have a drawer; what’s in the drawer is yours.

The funny thing about family economics is they never have been. It’s always rigged and there is little transparency into the sources and uses of funds. It’s individual economics stacked up and a myth that the biological family extends to the financial family. Has there ever been an estate equally shared? Only if it is nothing.

An equal sharing of the property of the planet would have resulted in every family having their own house, one car per outside worker, and all the food, clothing, schooling and medical care their children are likely to need while growing up. Don’t believe me? Let’s do the math. The wealth of the world today divided by the population yields $198,000 per person. No kidding. That’s enough.

If the land had been shared fairly and each child was given an equal piece and their children were given equal pieces, today we would all have a big enough piece to live on comfortably and to give to our children. The problem is that I must re-buy the land my parents bought and my children must buy their own. What happened to the wealth?

The wealth became infrastructure for the wealthy. My family’s wealth was invested and crashed in the 1970s and disappeared. It was absorbed by the machine. At one time, my parents had enough in the stock market to pay for all of us nine kids to go to college. Then it crashed to 10% of its value before they could sell. About the time I went to college, the wealth was gone. I took out loans.

The stone I started in consciousness with — that I consumed more than I contributed — just kept getting bigger instead of smaller. Even bigger when I worked full time. Even bigger after bankruptcy. Still with me today. It will consume most of my estate when I die. My children will likely inherit only photographs and letters.

My grandfathers both had family businesses and neither their spouses nor their children shared equally the family wealth. There were favorites among equals and everyone’s share was conditional and the conditions were never clear. The brothers that entered the family business and those that didn’t regarded each other with suspicion. Neither of my grandmothers knew exactly how much money came in from what source and it seemed to me they preferred not to know.

When my grandparents died, the transfer of wealth was opaque to me, a mysterious and lengthy process that made siblings adversaries, resulting in a frenzied and unseemly division of physical property such as clothing, jewelry, furniture, cars, while awaiting a “final settlement” of stocks, bonds and cash. The biggest change for me is that for the first time in my life I saw my Mother with her own money that did not come through my Father. She went on a cruise my Dad had no interest in, and ever since she called her own shots. Independent money can do that. We should all have independent money.

I’m married to an artist named Deborah O’Keeffe, was previously married to a florist named Storme O’Keefe, and I was never transparent with either of them about my money and they have never been transparent with me. Storme and I tried every which way to manage the household finances but no matter how we worked it, we both ended up broke. We tried separate bank accounts and one joint bank account and only using cash and ended up with one household account, two separate personal accounts, and two separate business accounts.

That’s the same system I started with when I married Deborah O’Keeffe: five bank accounts, 2.5 accounts each. It has since swelled to as many as 10 accounts straddling several banks. We try to roughly split the bills and to not live too richly when the other has no independent funds. Both households seemed to achieve financial balance but lacked transparency. It’s easiest to keep track when it adds up to nothing, the ins and outs somehow matching, the debt slowly getting paid down.

counterpunch