Thank you for this. I've never seen it before, and it sure goes to the
heart of things. By the same token, farm labourers would work about ten
minutes a day and factory workers about the same amount of time. That
being the case, it would be simpler for everyone just to pay them not
to work, as we pay (mostly) big time farmers and agribusiness) not to
grow things-- and as we risk human health and who knows what else to
enable farmers to produce a greter surplus of milk with the help of
rBGH, so that Monsanto may fatten profits. Just as we pay many
industries to pollute, making many harmful practices so cheap that
better practices (or energy sources) can't compete with them.
A large part of the problem is the fear that people would not work if
they were not pressed by fear and necessity. The truth has always been
that most people have always been eager to work if given something
really useful and not too horrible to do. There is also the secondary
fear, that people who didn't face starvation would have to be paid
enough to live decently, which makes unemployment very popular with
employers. Now that there is no where near enough economic work to go
round, we can no longer afford these fear-driven prejudices.
Caspar Davis
At 3:07 PM -0500 11/20/98, Don Chisholm wrote:
>....... or by Bertrand Russell, about that time:
>
>INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION - Friend or Foe
>
> Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are
>engaged in
>the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs,
>working
>(say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same
>number of men can make twice as many pins. Pins are already so cheap that
>hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world,
>everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four
>hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in
>the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work
>eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half
>the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There
>is, in the end, just as much leisure as in the other plan, but half
>the men
>are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is
>insured
>that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all around instead of
>being
>a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
>.. In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays - 1935
>
>
>
> ////////\\\\\\\\
> Don Chisholm
> 416 484 6225 fax 484 0841
> email [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> The Gaia Preservation Coalition (GPC)
> http://www.envirolink.org/orgs/gaia-pc
> personal page: http://home.ican.net/~donchism/dchome.html
>
>"There is an almost gravitational pull toward putting out of mind
>unpleasant
>facts. And our collective ability to face painful facts is no greater
>than
>our personal one. We tune out, we turn away, we avoid. Finally we
>forget,
>and forget we have forgotten. A lacuna hides the harsh truth." -
>psychologist Daniel Goleman
> \\\\\\\\\/////////
