Kurt Blurt

I've been looking at the collected letters of Kurt Vonnegut.  You can see, even before he became a professional writer, that he had style. You can also see he had leftist politics.  In a letter from 1947:

What must be realized is that the main trouble with free enterprise, with rugged individualism which gives every man the right to make as wide a margin of profit as he has the wit to wheedle, is that there is simply not enough wealth to go around.  If there is no ceiling on the amount of money a man can take out of our economy, then concomitantly there can be no firm foundation below which a human being cannot sink.

This is a common belief that turns many to socialism, but couldn't be more wrong.  Vonnegut seems to believe in a zero-sum-game economy, where if I make more money it's at someone else's expense.  But wealth is not a fixed sum.  Indeed, it can and does grow, and will grow much faster under a system of free enterprise.  To stifle free markets is to slow growth, and to suffocate them, as some would like, is to guarantee widespread impoverishment.

Even if Vonnegut believes in some amount of free enterprise, he's still looking at it the wrong way.  Look at the phrase "the amount of money a man can take out of our economy." So when people do well, they're taking money out of the system.  I would have thought, generally speaking, when people are making decent money it's because they offer goods and services which make their customers better off.  Someone who builds up a business is helping the community--both those employed by the company and those who are customers.

Vonnegut's politics sometimes do get in the way of his writing.  But he was smart enough to know he had to engage the reader regardless, and thus took enough of his reader's money out of the economy to become quite rich.