I want to thank you all for this excellent
discussion. For me, I prefer the Capitalist system's attitude
towards work. But I believe the limitation of for profit
only works for certain types of work that cannot be "free ridden"
on. i.e. the problem of "public goods" that are essential but are incapable
of profit or capitalization because they cannot be limited or the limitation
does not equal the cost of production. "Productivity" is
another problem concept for these essential businesses.
If I may be allowed to take you on a little circle here as
we look at some of the key issues for me from the perspective of my own
work. Just a quick review so that we are on the same page.
The problem of for profit capitalism is one of
making expenses and then making enough to pay yourself and your stockholders a
profit. Capitalization means that you have to guarantee some form of
profit return in exchange for the seed money to make things possible.
Expensive projects that do not guarantee profit are either lotteries, like
Broadway Shows where you gamble on the show "Hitting" the audience and then
you make a big return on a long run or they are stable ventures like industrial
companies where your money is supposed to be, but in the case of Enron etc.
isn't always, safe. I realize this is an artist's
over-simplification. But I think that is basically the story on
capitalism. Everything else, hedge funds, etc. are improvisations on
the basic story for the purpose of some "getting ahead" of others and
winning a higher profit. But this works only for certain segments of the
society and it is extremely externally motivated.
Certain activities are in the long run highly "profitable"
for a society but in the short run are too expensive to actually accomplish
privately. Space Programs for example. In fact, if
you look at most of the crucial services of society like education, law
enforcement, healthcare, religion, or culture to apply the for profit
motive amorally in a business sense is to create a nightmare of
chaos. Chaos is always creative ultimately but inhuman and horrible
in the short run. Such a thought is Nazi like in its
application. Consider if your doctor chose to make you sick in order
to heal you or to test a drug without your permission or if your
teacher deliberately created problems that he knew he could fix (not uncommon in
the voice teacher world). Neither case is a substitute for
real healing for real education. Healing and Education are
expensive. More expensive than for-profit private work can
accomplish. They are not productive. They cannot be mass
produced and sold at a profit and they cannot be downsized and
succeed. Like the old economist joke that can't tolerate a flute
player in an orchestra not playing and still being
paid. There are other issues here than just
"profit."
Let's look closer at just one of these, for
example in education, you must have small classrooms and the possibility of
individualized instruction that shapes the material to the perceptual profile of
the student. A for profit school can work for a time but
truly outstanding students will eventually destroy it because they are expensive
to teach. Scale or mass machine type production is essential for
productivity. Outstanding students often don't "fit." Not
"fitting" costs more. Truly productive schools can't tolerate
outstanding disruptive students if they are to be "profitable." That
is the same problem with individuals that pharmaceutical companies have
with nutrition. In the case of nutrition, people are bio-chemically
individual and programs must be individually developed for their nutritional
needs. That too is expensive.
In the case of education, people are perceptually
individual and the one size fits all education used today eliminates all but the
three Rs, all in the visual perceptual mode that is
inadequate to fit the needs of any one student who happens to
be primarily aural, kinesthetic, haptic, kinetic or chemical in their
perceptual dominance. The idea that all perceptual modes
need to be integrated to achieve a symmetrical synergy for maximum individual
efficiency is a foreign country to most educators who are still stuck in the out
of date European school models. Even home schooling is preferable
when the student is not primarily visually dominant. The
primary tools for education integration of these perceptual universes is the
Arts and yet this tool is both expensive and exceedingly time consumming of
teachers. Especially music (aural) teachers have to be virtuosically
trained not only in education but in the performance of the artistic
subject. Often students are required to expend hours a day in extra
supervised rehearsals with groups outside of school just to keep up and then
spend hours in individual practice as well. Such a requirement is
not in keeping with the scale activities of science, math and reading which
require much less time and are more controllable with fewer teacher
supervised hours. Also, visual testing is not done in public
and teachers are not submitted to performance type criticism if a student
fails a math test. If an instrumental or choral ensemble performs
poorly the teacher is blamed and the entire community knows they failed.
I admit the exception to this in the graphic arts and
so the graphic arts have recieved more money while other arts are
cut. (check the US Dept of Ed. Stats on the net) Graphic arts
are visual and relate to the visual curriculum and individual
tests unlike dance, music, drama or home economics where the chemical
modes of taste and smell are buried in the current curriculum.
As an aside, it doesn't seem to compute with this society
that the chemical mode might have anything to do with the rampant obesity of the
nation as a whole and that it could be an issue of educational
development. Because junk food is, like junk TV, productive
one only visually notices the effects of such monetary success while ignoring
the disease and chaos that comes about as a result in the individual lives of
people who aren't fortunate enough to have a quick metabolism but who lunch
daily at McDonald's.
Another proof of the tyranny of vision is found in what
constitutes "proof" itself. How many chemistry majors have
known what an "unknown chemical compound" was for a chemistry class, but
couldn't prove it in visual testing and therefore it wasn't
true? They knew what it was because of the smell and the taste
but they couldn't construct a visual formula to prove their own
body computer's conclusions.
I realize that I am on a "Shamanic" orgy of
connectedness here so I will get back to the "visually primary point" that
work is more complicated than capitalist for profit economics
can even imagine much less consider important.
Still I prefer the capitalist structure as a base to the
overt control of a socialist one. But, that being said I
believe that it has to be admitted that the capitalist structure as a system is
incapable of meeting the medical, educational, religious, legal and
cultural needs of a working society. Business should be business but
it should be clearly articulated what IS business i.e. profitable and
what is not. It should also be said that all work need not be
business but that everyone needs to eat and have money for the development of
their work.
In this realm I believe the Soviet system was superior in
their intelligent application of money to non-business
enterprises. If you passed the test for artistry you were paid
a stipend to create. It was acknowledged that some would never do
much more creating than they did under the external motivation
of force. These were admitted and paid basically
welfare. While the main group used the money to free
them to create. As a result, the artistic productivity of the
Soviet Union far outstripped anything the West had to offer. No
matter what the Master Art happened to be they developed far more product
and at a very sophisticated level than the US or the rest of the world in
spite of the KGB's interference. The one exception to this was
when the US government funded the European Arts programs
through non-communist socialism in order to compete with the Soviet Union
in the cold war. But that was not so in America. That is
why the Russian immigrants and international artists are taking over
much of our artistic institutions even though they are bringing in a foreign
culture and stripping American culture of its
identity. Eventually American children will
speak Russian music, not our own unless you are talking the simpler folk
forms. The Master forms and accents are
Russian. Instead of Charles Ives' July fourth Masterpiece
we are more comfortable with Tchaikovski's 1812 Russian overture and its not
just the cannons and the hymn. We know as much about contemporary
Russian composers on our concerts as we know about Ned Rorem.
American Masterworks are written but performed rarely and in many times only
once, as an oddity on concerts that preach a TNC musical ideal which is as
destructive of American identity as it is of other national industries and even
the concept of identity itself. What we would resist as visual
military conquest we welcome aurally because we are aurally unsophisticated.
Keith may not like the EU but the EU is the political
version of the statelessness that is indicative of the Internationalist ideal
manifest in TNC corporations with no loyalty to anyone but their own little
Aristocrats and citizen stockholders.
So what does this mean for BI and for
Capitalism? I believe the answer lies in the concept of
balance and the human body. These are all just systems in the
body of society and each must be balanced, made symmetrical and efficient so
that society can achieve a geniune synergy reaching beyond the sum of all of
these parts and into what it means to be human. In order to do that
people need to eat, be healthy, have education, proper shelter and enough money
to work in capitalizing their work whether for profit or not for
profit. In each case people should be paid for their work whether
it fits in the for profit world or not. As I
believe it was Keith that mentioned, use often runs years behind
discovery. Under the for profit tyranny, that condemns
creators to poverty. That is a stupidity akin to blaming your eyes
for telling you that your face is dirty. A balance must be achieved
and a logical direction must be planned. Human wisdom must be more
important than just making money on something that is
non-renewable. I'm tired of these grazers who
never stay in one place long enough to become geniuses at anything.
But there must always be a place for sheep and cattle so I guess I will just
have to accept them. But such animals need Shepherds or they die
alone. They also need herding to give them
motivation. That is not my culture or my
ideal.
BI is a form of providing the pasture for
free. All pastures are free but if not sustained through group
activity decline and turn to desert. That is the lesson that I would
suggest about BI. People should be paid for work and work
should be created that sustains the society and given the status that all
renewable activities should have in such a limited environment where even the
energy is peaking at this time and we can't even ratify the ideal of not
smothering each other in industrial shit. Forgive the lack of
political correctness here Arthur. I was feeling French
for the moment.
Ray Evans Harrell
----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas Lunde" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2003 1:39 AM
Subject: [Futurework] A Basic Income as a for of Economic
Governance
>
> Thank you for continuing this discussion with your usual intelligence and
> extensive background.
>
> As with many things you and I can spent time on defensive positions, attacks
> and riposte at another's gaffes or lack of knowledge. It's fun but
> pointless.
>
> It seems we have to ask some really basic questions in terms of outcomes so
> that the issue of a Basic Income has some context or as ol Marshal would
> say, some figure ground relationships. So, lets see if we can build some
> background on which we can place the Economic device called a Basic Income
> on.
>
> Taking the present, nation state, capitalistic economic system,
> globalization, robotation as ideas and forces that we live in and under,
> the question becomes "What about human beings?"
>
> Human beings, young, just born, adolescents, young parents, mature workers,
> senior citizens - that is what it is all about - what about them? What are
> they, families, individuals, citizens, consumers, workers, men and women -
> what are they?
>
> Well, there are many things aren't they, but what might be their
> commonalities no matter age, sex or state.
>
> 1. They all need to eat 3000 or some variant, calories a day.
> 2. They all need protection from the elements.
> 3. They all personal clothing
>
> And there we can stop - or we can go on:
>
> 4. They need governance.
> 5. They need a system of laws and rules to live under.
> 6. They need to feel physically secure
> 7. They need a reliable and consistent economic system
>
> And we can go on from their:
>
> 8. And they need a Constitution and Bill of Rights
> 9. And they need education.
> 10 And they need meaningful work.
> 11 And they need a medical system for health.
>
> And as we go on defining the background finer and finer, we come to choices
> and it these choices in response to the above needs, and many more unnamed,
> that lead us to discussions of how to distribute goods and services.
>
> One model, that I might suggest you and Keith feel comfortable with is the
> basic existing model of capitalism as it is practiced in America and Europe.
> Basically, income is distributed through work and therefore we need more and
> more work for economies to grow - without any stated goal of when growth
> shall be achieved. And with this model, more and more people work harder
> and longer to satisfy the goal of growth. But this model has been coming up
> against the challenge that more and more work is being done by machines and
> less and less human work is needed. Of course they are many more challenges
> to this system but our area of focus is primarily the redistribution of
> income so that human needs can be fulfilled. Unfortunatly, within this
> system is a cruelty that states that if you can't make it, then die. The
> worker is valuable, the non-worker is not - he becomes an expense.
>
> Another Model is one in which the needs of humans is considered a "right"
> and that model suggests different ways of providing for all human beings
> needs. Of course this model will have different answers to the problem. If
> societies and the world, made it a priority that every human being should
> have their needs satisfied as a basic acknowledgement of their being, then
> means would be found to do this. It would demand different solutions to
> current mindset.
>
> Now, without writing a book and meaning this to only be an introduction to a
> way of productively looking at our differences - which are differences of
> perspective rather than truth. One solution for Model One is:
>
> I would do something else immediately on taking office. I would ask
> Congress for a Full Employment Act, guaranteeing jobs to anyone who
> is willing to work. We would give the private sector all the
> opportunity to provide work, but where it fails to do so, the
> government would become the employer of last resort. We would use as
> a model the great social programs of the New Deal, when millions of
> people were given jobs after the private sector had failed to do so.
>
> As quoted by Brian Adams in a recent E Mail
>
> In Model Two, the model I am defending would be a Basic Income. My argument
> for this is that there is no need for us, as human beings, to continue to
> live at the level of lack of needs that is currently present for three
> quarters of the world or more and that it is time for our Nation States to
> redefine the Rights of Man to include the right to a Basic Income. And it
> is up to countries with wealth to show the way.
>
> It is not really a question of money. It is a question of perspective.
> Once we can clarify a perspective, then we can find the means to implement
> that vision. If I have defined the problem correctly, I will be pleased.
> If not, I ask you for your perspective at the level of the needs of human
> beings as the background for your choice.
>
> Respectfully,
>
> Thomas Lunde
> _______________________________________________
> Futurework mailing list
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
