There was a time, not long ago, that I worked technical support for a certain multi-level network marketing company. This week, something that's always bothered me about multi-level marketing sales strategies finally gelled. Basically, every such company I've run across does its best to repeat the garbage that "the middle class just aren't making it anymore." This drives me absolutely bonkers for several reasons.

Not long ago, Granny D wrote: "My father worked as a laborer in a furniture warehouse in Laconia, NH. He was able to own a house and raise five kids pretty decently. You can’t do that anymore." In other words, because I can't afford a new house on the wages I would get at McDonalds, there must be something wrong with our economy. And while multi-level marketing companies don't say it, most people then follow with "and there ought to be a law, ..." or "and the government ought to do something about it."

I've got a hunch about that house. I'll bet it was built on land given to her father from his parents' farm. I'll bet that her father built it himself, and that for several years it didn't have plumbing, electric wiring, a phone connection, and I doubt it was built according to any safety standards. In other words, I'll bet it was just like everybody else's house back then. I'll also bet that the five kids were busy providing free labor to the family so that they could make ends meet.

And if you give me the land, I don't even need a regular income to afford to build like that. Of course, nobody wants to live in a house like that today, and I don't blame them.

I spent two years in Brazil, and I saw people who really weren't making it. I saw houses made out of a combination of sticks and dried mud (covered with thick paint so the house wouldn't dissolve in the rain). There was a slum the size of a small town built on an open trash dump. In Brazil you're considered poor if you make less than $50 a month for a small family, because that's what it costs to eat. Those people were not making it.

In the US, the middle class generally have a $100 per month cell phone bill, a $50 per month broadband connection, cable or satellite TV, several cars, and glass windows. Don't tell me that you "aren't making it" because you can't buy everything you desire. I don't care if you use it as a sales tactic or to advance communism (one of Karl Marx's grand marketing ideas was to introduce anxiety to the middle class by telling them they doing as well as they would if they were allowed to keep all the fruits of their labors). It's nothing more than a bunch of malarky.

If I ever go postal, this will probably be the main reason.

UPDATE Paul Graham has another theory Granny D's father could afford a house as a factory worker.