Dear Pen-l, Since you don't know me I would introduce myself and list my credentials to gain your trust if I wanted you to take anything I write on my authority, but I only hope to persuade. (not that I have any credentials)
When is revolution just reform? There's not much agreement. To the proud fools who believe the propaganda we are being feed by the capitalist press socialism and communism are simply any attempts for the government to help the people. That includes any form of public service, like the municipal sewer system. Of course, they don't have a clue about socialism, or much of anything. To the "true" socialist anything short of a military attack on Wall street is "reformism." If their house was on fire they wouldn't put it out, because only the only action worth taking is the destruction of capitalism. Those of us who want fundamental change are blasted from both sides. It's not enough to advocate radical measures, the revolutionary set will reject any proposals that don't fit their obsolete doctrinaire version of a functional society. It's not enough to have good intentions, the blind conformist set will call anything that scares them communism. What is capitalism? If wealth was shared could that system be called capitalism? Do those who advocate sharing wealth fit into the magic word, reformer, or is that revolutionary? It depends on who one asks. I would really like it if anyone would step-up and make a comment on the following, or even find some magic words, like communist or reformist, to block it out. Barry Brooks Wealth or Consumption? Adopting the common-sense meaning of "consumption" to mean the end of an item's useful life, rather that meaning "use," will eliminate one source of fuzzy economic thinking. Our wealth is approximately all that we ever bought minus all that we ever consumed. Wealth is an amount, while income is a rate. They are connected by durability. (See Herman Daly, "Steady-state Economics) One example: cars produced at 100 per year ( a rate) that last 5 years would finally create and maintain a fleet of 500 cars (an amount). That same fleet could be supported by producing only 10 cars per year that last 50 years. As the life span of the cars approaches zero years the cars on the road would also approach zero. Life span, or durability, must be considered to know the value of what we produce. The blur of meaning between use and consumption has surely retarded understanding of the importance of durability. Extended durability and population stability (decline) will make inheritance the main source of wealth, someday. This kind of system would have a very high efficiency as defined below. Surplus labor combined with wage dependence means that we must increase consumption, beyond just filling real needs, to make jobs. It seems on the TV news that the goal of the economy is to make jobs, but the proper goal of any economy it to increase wealth. Making the most wealth requires making the least consumption, and that will cut the need for labor. We consider any unused labor to be a waste, but when we produce too much to stay busy we are wasting resources and pushing global warming. Since a small part of the human workforce can provide all the needed labor we need some way to make unemployment acceptable, even desirable. Maybe we should call it leisure. We should match the labor we use to the needed jobs, instead of matching the jobs to the maximum available labor, as we do now. How do we match the labor to the needed jobs? Since the labor we have available can not be reduced, the only answer is to not use it all. Just as a high-powered car needs a throttle to avoid going too fast, the economy needs a way to adjust the amount produced to the amount really needed, rather than producing as much as possible all the time. One way to do that is to provide a basic guaranteed income, which is adjusted down or up to keep wages from rising or falling. In a robot-run economy the total of all wages would be zero. All income would go to the owners of the robots and the resources they process for us. Unearned income reflects that we are parasites on the planet. While there is plenty of unpaid work, and the work ethic is important; earning a living is a delusion. We can't begin serious conservation so long as people are dependent on wages. Giving people a "free ride" may be unpopular, but if dividends are good why is welfare bad? The best, and defining, feature of capitalism is unearned income. We can't do or respect important unpaid work so long as work is just about money. By taking so much of people's time "full" employment competes with, and often prevents, work in family care, stewardship activities, education, and the leisure needed for a good life. Economic efficiency should be defined as use-value/required-consumption, but we seem to define it as actual-consumption/possible-consumption. The consumer economy is very efficient in its ability to waste and pollute. Where is the adult supervision? It seems to me that consideration of these ideas might be important. One can find implied solutions to "impossible" problems in these considerations. Barry Brooks http://home.earthlink.net~durable
