“Since he was a kid, Randy Miod wanted to be at the beach. Once he got there, he never left.” That’s what the Wall Street Journal’s Chris Kornelis wrote about Miod in “Crawdaddy’s” obituary.
Although he grew up in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, Kornelis reports that Miod was always at the beach. As a teenager, he skipped school so that he could “take the bus to Malibu’s famous Surfrider Beach.” Ultimately Miod just dropped out of high school altogether, got his GED, and moved to Malibu. As Kornelis explains it, “instead of a 9-5 day” that would get in the way of surfing, Miod “worked restaurant jobs that afforded him maximum time at the beach.” What a great, very American, story.
To which some might raise a skeptical eyebrow. Why celebrate seeming downward mobility whereby individuals turn their nose up to economic opportunity in a country dense with it? The question is mistaken. The genius of a free and prosperous society isn’t solely rooted in the career heights individuals can scale, but in fierce individuality that enables as many life choices as there are people.
In the United States we can become investment bankers and software developers, but also ski or surf bums as was the case with Miod. And we can support ourselves despite the fact that our purpose isn’t earning a living, but earning so that we can live.
Surfing was life for Miod, and he got to surf right up to his untimely death precisely because in free societies the prosperity that’s an effect of freedom results in something for everyone, including those whose wants have little to do with getting the “right” job. In Miod’s case he as previously mentioned worked a variety of restaurant jobs that grew in number as Malibu morphed into what Kornelis describes as “an exclusive enclave that’s home to the rich and famous.”
About what Malibu became (in his memoirs, actor Rob Lowe described the 1970s Malibu population as notably blue collar), it’s popular to think of wealth creation in a fixed pie, zero sum light such that growing wealth comes at the expense of those who aren’t. Not so with Malibu, and for people like Miod. As Kornelis put it, he was “part of a constituency of surfers, bartenders and blue-collar and middle-class workers who lived in RVs, trailers, studios, spare rooms – even a van parked on the street – if it meant they had easy access to Surfrider.”
In other words, the wants and needs of the rich in Malibu proved a source of sustenance for those who weren’t rich, who didn’t aim to become rich, but who wanted to make a life of surfing the beaches where the rich live. Stop and think about that. It’s not nothing.
To see why, contemplate the odds that coastal cities in Bangladesh have communities of “surfers, bartenders and blue-collar workers.” In Bangladesh people are working just to survive, not to surf. Choice is an effect of freedom, but also of prosperity that enables a myriad of choices.
Notable about Miod is that while in his 20s, he rented a run down house on Pacific Coast Highway that his restaurant wages paid the rent for. In 2005 the owner sold it to the Malibu fixture for $400,000. Where the rich live and eat, the pay can be handsome.
On January 7, Kornelis reports that Miod didn’t leave a property that had made him a millionaire on paper, and that he felt he could protect from the encroaching fires. Miod didn’t survive, but even in dying he finished out his sadly shortened life precisely where he wanted to be. Once again, what an American story.
