Chapter 4: Paraducers

The Middlemen of America

The definition of ‘Producer’ is of course gray. For example, an auto mechanic does not create anything new (usually) in the repair of an automobile, but I certainly would not label him a mere Consumer. It takes skill and experience to fix today’s autos, especially since they are designed to be built inexpensively, not repaired easily. Perhaps we can consider the mechanic someone on the much extended vehicle production line, just not in the factory.

In this large gray area, there is another class of people, not Consumers, not Producers, but rather intelligent Consumers who sell services to the Producers. I’ll call them Paraducers. They are perceived as Producers by most of the rest of society (sometimes even the genuine Producers), but behave mainly as Consumers and middlemen.

What do Paraducers do for us? Paraducers produce a service that is designed to benefit Producers or Consumers, but is also intended to preserve their place in the food chain as Paraducers. They do this because society’s need for them does not revolve around any product per se, but only around their services.

Paraducers also work to create systems that need Paraducers to function. They mediate or catalyze interactions between the Producers and Consumers and the system they have created, making themselves increasingly valuable and necessary in the process.

Paraducers also act to elevate their status beyond the societal level of Producers, in order to gain esteem and gain position close to the revenue stream in business and government. The people closer to and controlling the revenue stream can more easily pay themselves a higher wage.

Alvin Toffler identifies as the source of the Paraducer role the ‘wedge’ of the industrial revolution: “[T]he invisible wedge produced the entire modern money system with its central banking institutions, it’s stock exchanges, its world trade, its bureaucratic planners, its quantitative and calculating spirit, its contractual ethic, its materialist bias, its narrow measurement of success, its rigid reward systems, and its powerful accounting apparatus, whose cultural significance we routinely underestimate. From the divorce of producer from consumer came many of the pressures toward standardization, specialization, synchronization, and centralization.” ^[8]

The prime example of a Paraducer is of course the attorney. They have, in the United States, created a system of law over a 225+ year period, based on legal systems in Europe before that, and this system provides some framework for the legal interaction of Producers and Consumers in society. However, true to form for Paraducers, the system of law conveniently ignores the monopoly that its Paraducer designers created. The result is that a small class of Paraducers in our society controls all legal transactions while being almost entirely exempt from the costs it weighs on society, in contrast benefiting handsomely.

Take the attorney-as-Paraducer and elect him to office, and we end up with an entirely new class of Paraducer, one who controls further the legal interaction of Producers, not only in the US, but around the world (through treaties and tariffs). In Congress, we have hundreds of politicians who are exempt from many of the very laws they pass. And throngs of Consumers, for a small monthly government check, worship these people.

Remember, a Paraducer provides services to Producers and Consumers within a designed system that also works to protect the Paraducer. Toffler identifies Paraducers thus: “All sorts of occupational groups from librarians to salesmen began clamoring for the right to call themselves professionals – and for the power to set standards, prices, and conditions of entry into their specialties.” ^[9] Who would have guessed the rot and wreckage to follow?

You and I pay the price every day, because it is built into every product we buy. I bought a lawn mower and it had a sticker on the frame reading, “CAUTION! BLADE TURNS WHEN ENGINE IS RUNNING!” The cost of that label is incidental, but it implies a huge damage award that the manufacturer had to pay when some moron picked up the mower with the engine running and got his fingers chewed off. If Producers had been in control of that situation, they would have said, “You moron! The blade turns when the engine is running! What an idiot!” And that would have been the end of it. But that one dope and his attorney have penalized you and me with Paraducer costs to the tune of who knows how many thousands of dollars.

In Douglas Adams’ space comedy book, “The Restaurant at the end of the Universe,” the main characters end up being rescued of sorts and deposited on a space ship full of the oddest people. (The plot of the book is quite jerky, so you’ll have to just hang with me on this one.) The space ship is from the planet Golgafrincham, which was ‘doomed’, as they had been told before they fled. It’s a bit involved, so I’ll let the Captain tell it, from his bathtub on the bridge.

“The idea was that into the first ship, the ‘A’ ship, would go all the brilliant leaders, the scientists, the great artists, you know, all the achievers; and into the third, or ‘C’ ship, would go all the people who did the actual work, who made things and did things; and then into the ‘B’ ship - that’s us - would go everyone else, the middlemen, you see.” ^[10]

Most of the other people in the ‘B’ ship were in suspended animation, each compartment labeled with their job function, such as telephone sanitizer, hairdresser, used car salesman, and account executive.

Now the Captain thought it odd that they were the first ship to leave for the new planet, the planet that would replace their destroyed world, but they had not heard from the other two ships in five years.

The main characters in the book soon deduce that the smart Golgafrinchamites (if that’s what you would call them) concocted the doomed planet story as a ruse to rid themselves of all these middlemen, in the Captain’s words, or what you and I would call Paraducers.

You can imagine the Paraducers on Golgafrincham, wheeling and dealing for volume telephone sanitization contracts, and lobbying Parliament for hairdresser job protection and licensing statutes. That’s what Paraducers do. Now they are on a long trip to nowhere at nearly the speed of light.

(In America, we have a proper name for what Douglas Adams called “the ‘B’ ship”: The United Nations. But we yet lack the technology to get it into orbit.)

Here’s a short outline of Paraducer phrases that you will recognize.

That’s the humorous way to look at Paraducers.

An extreme way to look at them is this. If you were in a car wreck, and someone stopped to help, what kind of person would you choose to be your hero? An account executive? An attorney? A dot-com venture capitalist? A telephone sanitizer?

I think I would prefer a machinist or technician, or nurse, or someone who knows how to work with metal and tools, personally. I would choose a hero who uses his or her brain on a daily basis, solving difficult problems, working fast.

Think about it. Is it possible that we could live without attorneys and accountants? Unfortunately, we have progressed (digressed?) to the point in America that we will never be rid of the need for these people, simply because they have woven their web into every corner of our society. Jamestown is a mere memory. It’s just not economically feasible to restructure the whole country at this juncture, of course, and only a fool would propose such a thing.

There is, however, the possibility that we could reduce the influence of Paraducers and better our lot in the process. If we cut the number of attorneys per capita in half, we would still have a law office on every street corner and plenty of attorneys to handle real estate closings, but not as many to chase ambulances to the hospital and drive up our health insurance premiums.

That is my goal in this book, not just with attorneys, but with all manner of Paraducers: Reduce their influence by strengthening and activating Producers, increasing our freedom in the process.

“For who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?” – C.S. Lewis

Please understand that the definitions I give for Producer, Paraducer and Consumer are not high contrast, black and white by any means. In fact, some people occupy multiple roles. We have attorneys who bash corporations by day and coach little league teams in the evenings. Producers strain to brilliance by day, and veg-out in front of the television by night, exhausted. I discuss these roles here as if they are cut and dried, for brevity, and sometimes they are, but many times not. However, each person in society predominantly plays one role or the other, and that is the role I identify with them.

Michael Maccoby, in “Why Work,” ^[11] tells us that “A typology is a conceptual tool. It should not be used to pigeonhole or caricature people, but to understand better what is meaningful and satisfying to them.” The types I have selected should be interpreted in this context, but I might append, “…and how they interact in society, for better or worse.”

Am I shouting to the world that Producers are in some sense better than others? Or whining sour grapes that Producers are not as good as others? I am shouting to the world that Producers are better than others, at Producing, and nothing more. No sour grapes, no whining, just the facts, Ma’am. Paraducers have some traits that the Producers could benefit from, like their proclivity for organizing.