Andre Gouin wrote,
>Guaranteed Annual Income (or some such) is not about to come to be so long
>as it is not clear who's going to pay for it.
>
>Reduced working time for the same income is also not about to come into
>being so long as, again, it is not clear who is going to pay for it.
In both cases, it _is_ clear who's going to pay for it. It has already been
paid for many times over. The cost in "guard labour" of maintaining huge
gaps in wealth far exceeds the money amount of those gaps. Guard labour
doesn't just include prison guards and security guards, it also includes
spin doctors, think tankers and network executives whose job it is to make
an extremely irrational system look perfectly natural. Make no mistake,
these people work hard for their money, putting in 70 hour weeks to tell us
what we know ain't so.
But the bottom line is that all this guard labour doesn't contribute one
iota to the general social well-being. It simply confiscates a
disproportionate share for those whose conscience is so underdeveloped that
they can view their highly paid social subtractions as indispensible. What
justifies paying people for their unique "skill" at doing the unconscionable?
Fred Block (a social economist whose judgement I respect) estimated that
about 15% of the work performed in North America was necessary to produce
our standard of living. The rest goes to sustain our standards of inequity.
Even if only 1/4 of the presently wasted work effort was available for
redistribution, that's one hell of a big slush fund.
Regards,
Tom Walker
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