Tahir,
Thanks for your post below. I need to clarify a few point in
my essay to avoid misunderstanding.
Barry
TAHIR WOOD wrote:
> .... The idea of dividing humanity
> into a group of producers and a large unproductive group
> while relying on technology to keep up a high level of
> productivity seems a rather contrived and unbalanced
> solution to me.
Those who study and become qualified for a job can compete
for available paid work. They will get paid for their work, just
as is done today. The difference would be that those who
can't compete wouldn't still have some income. There would
be turnover and individual variation and control. Yet, life is always
going to be unbalanced. Is a balanced diet half junk-food?
> They will simply be the recipients of a certain
> distributed product. What will be the politics of this sort
> of society?
Thank you god/nature/society for the gift of this food? ...As
opposed to the arrogant pretense that we have earned what
we have really just taken.
> " when we create nearly
> full employment our powerful technology and out large supply
> of workers will always consume far too many resources for
> such hyper-activity to be sustainable." Is technology then
> some external force which impinges on humanity in a one-way
> determinism, as your formulation suggests to me, or is it
> something that we can create and control?
Well technology helps us with our work and increases hourly output,
we could use technology to impede production, but why? Just to feel
in control? The control is in admitting that machine are supposed to
replace human labor, that's what they are for! Now let's take a vacation!
> Obviously you do not subscribe to the labour theory of
> value. What sort of economic theory supports statements such
> as the following: "Our present views rarely include any
> awareness that wealth comes from nature and inheritance more
> than from any work we do."
For many years I didn't understand the labor theory of value, but
now I see that prices reflect human(wage/profit) costs only, because we
can never pay nature for what we take. God has no bank account.
Wealth/value is not the same thing as prices/money.
And, by the way, using high prices to limit consumption causes suffering
and povery. Policyies to support need changes, to replace wasteful systems, are
much better. Then demands can be cut after needs are cut.
> But above all for me the stress that you put on unearned
> income is most bizarre, even while your critique of growth
> can and should be accepted. Also I think that your approach
> of starting from the labour surplus and then not adopting a
> position on population is strange, because if you are
> assuming a static population, against the current and
> empirically observable pattern - in other words stasis is
> something to be achieved - then why would you not try to
> achieve negative population growth, which would seem to be a
> more direct and more coherent way of addressing your problem
> of economic growth and labour surplus, no?
What ever the population level, keeping people busy as wages-slaves
is not my idea of a good society. If we don't stop our hyper-active
economy very soon the population is going to go down whatever
we may think about it, and in an unpleasant way.
Barry Brooks
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