Tom Walker wrote:
Fred Block (a social economist whose judgment 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,
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,
Thomas
Your whole answer is evocative of further discussion but it
was this paragraph that really caught my attention. Just a few minutes
ago, I was eating my bowl of porridge and watching TV and I was struck by the
amount of advertising I was watching for products I was not interested in and
would never buy and don't even need to know about. The amount of money
that was spent by industry to capture my attention in the hopes of a sale for
their product is immense. Yes, it creates work but does that work have any
value. If we had a library of every commercial written since 1850 for
every media that has been used for selling and we computed the cost of all that
vacuous air, and transformed it into funds that were distributed to people as a
Basic Income and limited advertising to information on the package of the item
being sold, two things would happen. First, we would have released the
majority of our creative artists into other areas of endeavor. Two, we
could have still had the competitive marketplace where products compete on price
and benefits.
In following this, it becomes feasible to see that there is
and has been money available for redistribution. Why hasn't it been
done? We have not come up with an overwhelming reason for change and that
is the challenge I have proposed.
