Ed,
People in trouble can be helped by churches and other good people who do that kind of thing - until they get back on their feet.
Work can always be found for people who are unable to do very much - either because they are not particularly clever, or because they have some kind of disability. In all cases there need be no loss of "dignity" because these things happen (shrug) and a helping hand at the right time does a mess of good. (I think those last few words are colloquial American rather than anything English.)
Except, the modern economy is so inadequate that those in trouble are not a small number eagerly helped, but a huge proportion of every country's population. (People in trouble are not only those in the soup kitchens.)
Economic problems cannot necessarily be laid at the feet of economists. As a group, the economists I have known have been generally been superior people. However, they are working with inadequate tools. At the time they should be querying the flawed material, they are busy trying to get their degrees, so the economic ABC's are accepted quickly as they head toward the difficult stuff.
I've only been friendly with one Nobel economist, and much of what he said I didn't understand. But, he was enthusiastic and was good enough to think (or pretend) I understood. (On the other hand, the economic Nobels I did understand I was mostly confronting.)
Yet, none of them, right or left wing (try to imagine right or left wing physics or chemistry) know enough about the economy to ensure that anyone who wants to work has many choices from which he can pick.
It's a problem of distribution. Yet, so inadequate is modern economics, that it cannot provide us with just economic distribution, but must rely on political distribution - a practice guaranteed to inspire a web of corruption and inevitable injustice.
All because economists were swept through the inadequacies of their basic theory by the need to get to the complicated stuff. There is no time to discuss what should be the simple question - which you have heard before.
"Why in spite of increase in productive power do wages tend to a minimum which will give but a bare living?"
This was asked in 1979. I suppose not even Brad can blame failure to answer this on Bush.
Harry
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Ed wrote:
The following exchange is from another list in which the poor and working poor discuss their problems and those who are in a position to try to help them. Many of the problems arise out of the difficulty of accessing Canadian federal and Ontario programs, and the meanness of those programs. The messages say, in various forms, that if you are down and under there isn't much you can do to get up and out. "OW" is "Ontario Works", a program that makes welfare recipients work for the money they receive, which may not be bad in concept, but which is often very bad in application.
The official line of the Government of Ontario is that "Ontario Works is working. Since 1995, approximately 600,000 people have left the welfare system, with savings to taxpayers of more than $13-billion." It doesn't say whether the people who have left the welfare system have found jobs or have simply fallen out of any system.
Some of you may find the exchange interesting.
Ed Weick
**************************************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: (818) 352-4141 -- Fax: (818) 353-2242 http://home.attbi.com/~haledward ****************************************************
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