> What it suggested is that there is a third world in the US, the
> wealthiest country in the world. What Ehrenreich says in the
> current article is that the American third world is sinking, perhaps
> into a fourth world.
There was apiece in the Toronto Globe & Mail recently that reported
how economic groups such as the OECD were amazed (they didn't actually
say "shocked and appalled" but they meant that :-) because poor people
in 3rd world countries were just, well, you know, doing stuff that
other people needed done. You know? Like, just working? Hang out a
shingle and fix broken stuff, make new stuff, whatever. No license,
no employer, no tax, no permit.
Jeez, they said, what is the world coming to? Here we do all this
stuff to Create Jobs and Employment and.... well, okay, so the job
creation thing isn't doing all that well in lotsa places but what
*can* these people be thinking, cutting us and the gummint out of the
action?
In the US, there seems to me to be two competing traditions:
The more recent one is based on the sense of entitlement to a full
panoply of consumer goods that's been engendered by television. "I
can't be a real person unless I have all that Stuff, or a least tacky
down-market imitations of it." So deprivation turns people to apathy,
crime, dependency, alcohol etc.
The older tradition is self-sufficiency. "My great-granpa lived in a
sod house, my granpa hauled a load of wood to town with horses each
week to trade for flour and my daddy farmed his rocky holler all his
life. I worked 30 years for GM but if GM's gone, we can make do in a
sod house if we have to."
One can hope that, if (or as) the US socioeconomic infrastructure
decays, people will opt for the older model. Regrettably, we have in
place a whole body of regulation to prevent it. Among other things,
it's generally against the law to shelter yourself and your family. You
either have to build to code -- tens of thousands of dollars in
mandated details, more thousands to meet minimum size and so on -- or
you can live in a cardboard box under a bridge. Shacks, cabins, sod
houses or anything in between the two extremes are not allowed.
A down-town urban variant of building your own shelter is the squat --
an abandoned mall or factory, a failed condo complex or whatever --
but once again the existing legal, regulatory and liability
infrastructure in the US responds with a shudder, harrassment and
extirpation.
Is there a good master's thesis in comparing self-sufficiency in, say,
Bangladesh of Mali with the criminalization of self-sufficiency in
industrialized countries?
FWIW,
- Mike
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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