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A World Without The Welfare State
Submitted Richard M. Ebeling via The Cobden Centre,
We live in an era in which few can even conceive of a world without the welfare state. Who would care for the old? How would people provide for their medical needs? What would happen to the disadvantaged and needy that fell upon hard times? In fact, there were free market solutions and non-government answers to these questions long before the modern Big Government Welfare State.
In fact, before the arrival of modern welfare state, voluntary, private-sector institutions had evolved to serve as the market providers for many of those “social services” now viewed as the near-exclusive prerogative of the government. Unfortunately, after nearly a century of increasing political and cultural collectivism, the historical memory of the pre-welfare state era has all but been lost.
Great Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries is an historical case study in how many of these problems were handled without political intervention in the private affairs of society.
The Friendly Societies and Mutual Insurance Protections
The focal point for many of these private-sector answers was the “friendly societies.” When they first arose in the late 18th and early 19th century Britain, the friendly societies were mutual-aid associations for insurance for the cost of funerals of workers or their family members.
But as the 19th century progressed, the friendly societies expanded their activities to encompass four primary services: 1) accident insurance that provided weekly allowances for the families of workers who were injured in their places of employment; 2) medical insurance that covered the cost of medical care and prescribed medicines for workers and their families; 3) life insurance and assistance to maintain family members in case of the death of the primary breadwinner or his spouse; and 4) funeral insurance to cover burial costs for the worker or members of his family. Later on, many of the societies also developed savings and lending facilities for members, fire insurance and loans for home purchases.
By 1910, the year before Britain’s first National Insurance Act was brought into law, approximately three-quarters of the work force of the British economy was covered by the private, voluntary insurance associations of the friendly societies. The memberships in their associations covered the entire income spectrum, from the middle- and higher-income skilled worker to the low-wage, unskilled members of the work force.
The friendly societies also offered instruction in self-responsibility, often rotated their officer positions to teach leadership among the members, and supplied advice on better managing of members’ family financial and related affairs.
In the years before the First World War, the free society had developed and was extending the very social institutions needed to handle all those concerns that in our own time are considered the responsibility of the state. What the modern welfare state did was to preempt and undermine the free market’s solutions to many of what we call today “social services.”
State regulation of the friendly societies, subsidized “free” medical and insurance services, and new taxes to cover the government’s cost for providing these national insurance schemes all resulted in a crowding-out of the voluntary alternatives of the private sector.
Private Charity and Voluntary Assistance to the Poor
For the 300 years between 1600 and 1900, British society generally took it as axiomatic that charitable work was the responsibility of individual and private corporate effort. Even the notorious English Poor Laws that generated so many negative side effects were considered to be a narrow and limited supplement to the primary activities of the private sector.
British private philanthropy reached its zenith in the 19th century, and this was not an accident. During this epoch of classical liberalism, the state was not regarded as either the proper or most efficient vehicle for the amelioration of poverty.
Especially for the Christian classical liberal, his faith required him to take on the personal responsibility for the saving of souls for God.
Most of the Christians in 19th-century Britain also believed that to help a man in his rebirth in Christ, it was essential to help him improve his earthly life, as well. Soup kitchens for the hungry, shelters for the homeless, training of the unskilled for gainful employment, care for the abandoned or poverty-stricken young, and the nurturing of a sense of self-respect and self-responsibility for an independent and self-supporting life were all seen as complements to the primary task of winning sinners over for salvation.
By the 1890s, most middle-class British families devoted 10 percent of their income for charitable works — an outlay from average family income second only to expenditures on food. Total voluntary giving in Britain was greater than the entire budgets of several European governments, and more than half a million women worked as full-time volunteers for various charitable organizations.
Individual Initiative and Leadership in Voluntary Giving
Individuals of position, wealth, or vision felt it their Christian duty to take up the saving of souls and the caring for these people’s material circumstances as steppingstones to the “remaking” of Christ’s children. For example, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the seventh Earl of Shaftsbury, who was considered a prominent evangelical Christian, and as one historian of the period put it, “a sort of conscience of the nation, a man of such outstanding virtue that the association of his name with any enterprise gave it instant respectability and mass appeal.”
Thomas Barnardo, associated with the Church of Ireland, founded his own charitable organizations that came to care for, house, and educate tens of thousands of children in the poorest circumstances throughout England. William Booth created the Salvation Army, saving souls as well as teaching those who came to Christ through his organization the importance of self-responsibility and paying their own way through work and honesty in all avenues of life. William Cadbury (of Cadbury chocolates) and William Lever (of Lever Brothers’ soap) created, with their own money, model workplaces and communities for their workers.
An advantage of this world of private charity is that it enabled innovation and experimentation to discover the means most likely to bring people to God and improve their earthly conditions. At the same time, the competition among charities for voluntary contributions rewarded those organizations that demonstrated the effectiveness of the methods they used and weeded out the less successful ones.
The Rise of Socialism and the Demise of the Private Sector
At the turn of the century, however, a sea change began to occur in the philosophy and ideology of many charities and their corporate sponsors. In a period experiencing the rise of socialist ideas, the view developed that government needed to assist or supplant the efforts of private individuals and organizations. And among a growing number of Christian groups concern for earthly improvement of the poor began to take first place over the previously primary task of saving souls.
As the government began to create the welfare state, many of the private charities found it increasingly impossible to compete with the “free” services supplied by the state. And, at the same time, many people now paying higher taxes to finance government welfare programs came to believe they had paid their “fair share” through taxation, so private giving was either not needed or no longer affordable.
Also, as the 20th century has progressed, many private charitable organizations have themselves become dependent upon government funding for large fractions of their activities. This has resulted in increasing government regulation and supervision of their programs. Furthermore, since “he who pays the piper calls the tune,” Christian charities have had to diminish or remove the evangelical element in their activities under government rules against religious proselytizing by those receiving government funds.
From Private Action to Government Control
Another aspect of this politicization and co-opting of these private sector solutions to “social problems” is that it really has involved a massive growth in governmental power and decision-making.
The rhetoric is often of transferring income and wealth from “the rich” to the poor or more disadvantaged. But as a number of critics have pointed out, it has really and mostly involved a transfer of power and control from the hands of the citizenry to that of those in political authority.
This theme was especially emphasized by the French social critic, Bertrand de Jouvenel, in a book on The Ethics of Redistribution(1951). Income is not merely a means for physical maintenance of oneself and one’s family plus a few dollars for leisure activities. What we do with our income is an expression of ourselves, a statement about what we value, how we see ourselves, and what we wish and hope to be.
How We Spend Our Wealth Reflects and Teaches Values
The way we use our income enables us to teach future generations about those things that are considered worthwhile in life. Income acquired above some notion of a “minimum” is also the way individuals have had the means to perform many activities “for free” that are considered the foundation of the social order, from community and church work, to support for the arts and humanities.
Deny an individual the honest income the has earned, even when it is above some hypothetically “reasonable maximum,” and you deny him the ability to formulate, and give expression to, his own purpose as a human being. And you deny him the capacity to make his voluntary contribution to the civilization and society in which he lives, as he sees best
De Jouvenel argued that such contributions have been, and remain essential for a good society. This is demonstrated, he shows, by the common belief of most of those who advocate redistribution: since most people will no longer have the “independent means” to perform such social services and activities, the state must now perform them.
Elitist Contempt for the Common Man
And there is a strong elitist element among redistribution advocates. They do not trust “the poor” to have the intelligence or wisdom to spend their income in “socially desirable ways.” The poor prefer to spend their money on beer rather than Beethoven. So, the state takes over that responsibility for them. And it is in this that de Jouvenel sees the real significance of redistributive policies. What is redistributed is not wealth from the rich to the poor, but power from the people to the state.
Individuals no longer plan their own lives, and use their own money, to fulfill those plans. Individuals no longer care for their own children, teach them how to live as human beings or guide them as to what to value and pursue in life. In terms of time, income and talent, individuals are now reluctant to contribute themselves to the society in which they live.
No, these are now in the hands of the state because, through taxation, the state has denied individuals the capacity to do them. The state plans our lives, cares for our children, and decides what should be supported in society as socially desirable and to what extent.
And as the state grows stronger, the individual grows weaker. We become weaker, not only in relation to the state, but also as human beings because we no longer exercise those qualities and habits of mind that only self-responsibility teaches and makes possible.
In spite of the pervasiveness of the Welfare State in our modern society and the tax burden that is imposed to fund it, it is worth remembering that Americans’ generosity and benevolence still stands as a beacon for the world. In 2013, Americans donated nearly $420 billion to charitable causes, and this was a nearly 13 percent increase over the 2012 level of voluntary philanthropy in the United States.
But a culture of self-responsibility and benevolence can be and is undermined by a paternalistic state, in which the government not only takes away the income and wealth through which individuals can express and reflect their values and beliefs, but weakens the very idea that such decisions and judgments should be in private rather than political hands.
The Welfare State makes us all poorer in character and independence. Confiscation of freedom through abridgements of individuals’ rights to their life, liberty and honestly acquired property, also brings with it a less humane and civil society.
With liberty comes not only the individual’s right to make his own choices concerning how best to live his life. The experience of the Great Britain and the United States before the modern Welfare State makes it clear that free man are also civilized human beings who demonstrate appropriate and reasonable interest and concern with others in society deemed deserving of charitable benevolence.
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For the most part every man desires to eat the bread of his own labor. The state does everything in it's power to take even that away from him, a few more twist of the knobs by Central Command and we will all be digging through the land fills for a few diaper taco's.
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spammers life can never be fun maybe you should start working part time for real
Obozo The Great has created his free-shit zombie army.
We'll never kill it... It will destroy us!
"The poor prefer to spend their money on beer rather than Beethoven."
I beg to differ. But, I do like a good beer now and then.
J. S. Bach
the Welfare State was created by the monopolists to keep the poor from burning down their houses and stringing those fascist bastards up by the neck like we did at the end of WW2.
the Welfare state has to exist since these same greedy fucks sent our good jobs overseas so they could have a 25th car, or a 7th house or a nice little island somewhere they can spend 5 days a year at -
thru time we've dealt w this problem - they say its cause the poor are lazy - like those nazi germans say about greece - EXCEPT the workers ij greece who still have jobs Work Longer than the germans -
thr ruskies lined those bastards up againat a wall and shot them, during the usa revolutionary war we tarred and feathered them - the french invented a nifty little toy called the guillotine for them -
now the fascists are BACK and complaining about poor people wanting to eat while they steal more than 100% of new economic growth - of course that theft is codified cause they bribed the kleptocratic politician -
and the segment of society that have PROVERN they can't be trusted to run things except for their own short sightd benefits?
the ultra-wealthy!
hang em ALL!
as they'd do unto us
So you work for any of the following: the US gov't, a state like Illinois, a hedge fund (Citadel) or a TBTF band (Chase). We get it - why rub our faces in your corruption? Just send us a check and quit the propaganda.
I knew a woman who, when she was 18, wanted to 'help people'. She got a degree in social work while in college. She worked for the state for two decades, until she could retire. She didn't 'help' people; she was part of a system that made them dependent. That system actually ended up hurting people. Her ultimate bosses didnt really give a damn about people. The 'social services' were just something they could point to around election time. And it was a way to make their realm, - government - , even larger.
At its foundation that system is immoral. It forces people to support the social system 'clients', minions, and bureaucrats - and this is done at the point of a gun. (Just try not paying the extortion money- state taxes - and see what happens to you.)
Of course, this woman didn't know all this at 18, and now she is too emotionally invested in it all to recognize the truth. I would have told her all of this back then, but I was also 18 and didn't know any better either.
The General Axiom of Government #3: "Being nothing but a criminal syndicate, government always accomplishes the opposite of the stated goal, as the stated goal is always a lie."
The banksters need to repay us.
If you're stupid and need a job you work for the Govt or die off.
Over the years this type of the second welfare grew and grew and they gave even moar jobs to even moar stupid people so that now it's a welfare class even bigger by 10 for the welfare group they are supposed to serve.
Now after 50 years there are 3 to 4 generations of families entrenched there to perpetuate the scheme.
Like Fireman and cops....same families suckling retirement and medical bennies from all you taxpayers
We are totally screwed
We are already into FSA generation 4.
Sorry, you spurred a random, early morning, Off Topic thought.
Gen 4 Corvette.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Corvette_%28C4%29
Some of the best and worst Corvettes produced to date.
As someone with a private sector job, it seems I'm stupid to not be in gov't or on welfare. I'm watching the last decent paying private sector jobs go to Asia or whatever becomes the lowest bidder in the future. Pretty soon there will be no jobs in the private sector except for $7.25-25.00 per hour, gov't, or welfare taker.
Your point is good, but don't you think there's something even darker? I prattle frequently about the influence of power-seeking psychopaths in our lives; one place in particular that stands out as a haven for individuals of at least mildly pathological bent is government bureaucracy, especially in areas like social work, the military, and environmentalism, not to mention public unions. Newcomers quickly find themselves tested to see if they have the right stuff, the sort of cunning and morally flexible character that can be comfortable around other hypocrites. Those who cannot be corrupted either find themselves relegated to administrivia, their positions undermined or sabotaged in some way, or simply pushed out the door.
Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes (Lobaczewski, 2nd ed., 2007)
"...If the many managerial positions are assumed by individuals deprived of sufficient abilities to feel and understand the majority of other people, and who also exhibit deficiencies in technical imagination and practical skills - (faculties indispensable for governing economic and political matters) - this then results in an exceptionally serious crisis in all areas, both within the country in question and with regard to international relations. Within, the situation becomes unbearable even for those citizens who were able to feather their nest into a relatively comfortable modus vivendi. Outside, other societies start to feel the pathological quality of the phenomenon quite distinctly. Such a state of affairs cannot last long. One must then be prepared for ever more rapid changes, and also behave with great circumspection." (p. 140)
The implicit lesson, forgotten every 2-3 generations, is that government must never be allowed to achieve anything like its present scale and pervasiveness, for it becomes an uncontrollable monster. Barring some extraordinary transformative interruption and reform, the parasite consumes the host, with terrible consequences for all society.
The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America (Daniel Hannan, 2011)
And this is what all this shit produces: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/01/atlanta-tee...
Who do you think payed for that?
He a good boi, din do nuffin. Wuz gunna be a rapper-astronaut. Dem doctors and cops wuz rayciss.
Black lives matter™
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I don't give shit that you're a gay assed, homo, bi-sexual, deviant that no one in thier right mind would touch with a ten foot pole...
You have a business plan that doesn't invovle a fucking mega-bank...by all means, contact me...let's chat.
{jebus, typing that shit gagged the shit out of me.}
How many of the fruits of your labor are taken up in the welfare state and how many are taken up in interest on the debt-backed money system, corporate dividends, stock buybacks, and rent? How many are taken up by the warfare state in order to create new markets for corporations and banks? And how much is taken up in the secular inflation that our Federal Reserve calls "price stability"? Compare these expenses, which amount to 30% of our GDP and will make up more when interest rates rise, to the welfare state which is roughly 15% of GDP.
The welfare state is the price of capitalism that prevents it from exploding in violent revolution. If we are to avoid paying this price we must move to a social ownership model in which enterprises are managed by their workers, not by oligarchic shareholders who produce nothing. The debt-backed money system must end and the cost of capital must reduce in order to end the magnetic pull that existing wealth has on new production.
Yes, and the state also provides ten times the welfare for the corporatocracy, so I tire of articles like this.
They miss the point that the corporatocracy, the kleptoligarchy, the hegemony of the the wedded state and banks/insurers/corporations along with complicit central banks are the problem - and instead re-hash the old -'isms and memes that keep us locked in servitude and inaction.
This isn't about politics, it is about fundamental human morality and ethics.
Tear the whole fucking thing down, all of it, and reboot.
Are tax breaks truly corporate welfare? If the CEO of a corporation makes $10M, is he not taxed on that amount? If his pay is reduced to $5M what is to be done with the other half? Taxed or invested? Corporations can be villains for sure, but there is a lot of misunderstanding on this subject.
To be fair, CEO's and board members get the lions share of their income from stawk options taxed at 15%, the issuance of which, dilutes the Mom & Pop "investor" while at the same time the PR departments inside said corporations robotically proclaim that the CEO & board holds the individual investors interests in the highest regard...which is obviously a flat out lie.
Its just as ridiculous as those on "the other side" saying we need to tax those eeevilll corporate profits at a higher rate! to help the national treasury and decrease deficit spending, they don't understand (or are lying to themselves & others) that any tax increase on a corporation will show up at the retail level in the form of higher prices for "stuff" a corporation produces.
The problem of course is, the statists predilection to screwing around with the tax code at the drop of a hat to modify peoples behavior and actions to the current political winds.
Its a joke being played on us, the whole thing needs to burn.
The warfare state, on the other hand....
Yup. Aka Darwinism -- at the individual and collective level.
Those (individuals and groups) who are able to adapt the fastest and the best, 'Win'. I.e. they get to climb higher on the Totempole than the rest.
Mother Nature won't cry or cheer for the losers nor winners. Nor will the 'gods' intercede -- contrary to what is popular opinion, but bad information (nothing like a nuke or the Plague to flag the fact that the gods don't give a damn), no matter how disturbing to its sellers and consumers.
Break people’s legs then give them a crutch… and make them grateful to you for the crutch.
My problem with Darwinism is the liberals who insist the most loudly that it is the gospel are the same people who do their damnedest to interfere with the process. Natural selection would suggest that those who don't wear seat belts would gradually die off. Why do liberals universally demand seat belt laws?
What? Since when has natural selection been owned by liberals? That's news to this poor bastard.
Wake up and cite one other source where you have heard it preached for the last 80 years. And don't cite me your Church of What's Happening Now established 1968.
Warfare IS Welfare goddamit!!
All states from 10,000 BC to 1900 were "warfare states". The state's whole raison d'être, and the only thing it's ever done competently, is decide who needs killing and kill them.
Western morality is partly to blame in this area. People are told that if they don't aid the poor, they are selfish and evil, and this goes back long before the modern era.
Personally, I do often enjoy finding ways to help people, and when I see an individual whom I can help, I find a way to do so. But here's the thing: when I do that, I do it for selfish reasons. Yes, read that again: when I help people - even people I don't know - I do it for selfish reasons. I do it because it feels good to me personally to be able to help. It gives me a sense of power, my own individual personal power and responsibility.
If someone tells me, however, that I am supposed to help this group or that, or this cause or that, because it's "the right thing to do", my first instinct is to tell that person/group to fuck off. They don't know me. They don't know what I can or cannot offer. They don't know why I might want or not want to help their pet cause. I hate being preached to. I have traditions that come to me inherently and through my upbringing. I value those tremendously. I don't need someone telling me where to focus my energies.
And the welfare state? Well, needless to say, this is the ultimate telling of people how to help. We are given zero choice in the matter. They take our money and give it based on some bureaucrat's choice.
Forced, pressured, or coerced charity is not charity. That's the simple fact of it. It's politics. It dehumanizes us and disrespects our innate ability to behave as our instincts would have us do anyway. Individuals are worth so much more than our overlords think we are. But based on their power trips, they are convinced it's their way or no way. Control freaks, nothing more and nothing less.
There is a big difference between the moral imperative of giving to the poor, and having your income taken from you at gunpoint by the state on the pretense that some tiny fraction will end up in the hands of the disadvantaged.
If you have a problem with moral suasion, then you are a morally defective person, and you need to own that. If you have a problem with the state forcibly confiscating your hard earned income, then congratulations-- you are a free man.
Whoever is down voting you is outing him/herself as a statist collectivist. A very honest and spot-on post.
Western popular morality (pro-pity, charity, humility, and everything weak and pathetic; anti-everything strong and unique) was gifted to us by Christianity. It's an intolerant morality that wants to be The One True Morality™ that's applied universally. Every religious idiot knows that the reason he perceives the world as being a very negative place is that too many other people don't follow the same moral values that he does (not because of his moral values themselves!). But he's a dying breed, which is to say that he's losing power in this world. Hopefully the morality of the lower classes will eventually be changed into something healthier such that they have a positive outlook on life rather than a negative one or one that relies on an afterlife or anything imaginary to redeem their existence.
Hopefully the morality of the lower classes will eventually be changed into something healthier such that they have a positive outlook on life rather than a negative one or one that relies on an afterlife or anything imaginary to redeem their existence.
Good luck with that. The very system that "helps" the poor is built to not only sow their resentment towards the producers that subsidize their aid but also encourage the very behavior that promulgates their dependency. After all, if people are happy and self-sufficient, what need is there for government support? Indeed, I'd suggest that it's grossly immoral to encourage dependency, which is exactly how political power is attained in far too many cases. As such, I'd call Utopia the most proven lie around.
well put
Gifted my arse. There's nothing watery or weak about Catholic or Orthodox Christianity. The brand of "Christianity" brought to America by English Puritans is not Christianity. Nor is the brand of "Christianity" practised in c19th England. If you or the author knew the first thing about Victorian England you would understand "Christian charity" was just a reaction to the guilt that the British felt as they gained an Empire and abandoned God. Please don't throw the rest of us in with that mawkish lot.
I help people, and often don't know why. But I think you explained it to me.
I help people because I can. I have power.
I have a bit of extra money, and I personally know what poverty is like. I know what it feels like to spend a month,or more, on nothing other than bread and a little milk so your wife and son can eat everything else. And do it for two or three years. It's what used to be called being the 'man'. I do not wish that on any other man on earth.
If you are hungry, you come to me. I will pay for what ever you want to eat. I'll even pay for the next meal, what ever it is. This is not just me, this is me and my wife. She's a champion, she knows she can buy anyone, anywhere, food, for any duration, without prior notification to me, and have my complete backing.
There are basics to being a Human Being. One of those is to NOT ignore those that are hungry in your immediate area. My preps include 200% give-aways in food. I will not witness my neighbors starving while I have the means to help them. Nor will my wife.\
I call my wife names and shit, but she is actually a Saint. If it wasn't for her, I'd be out there attacking your stashes, killing you and your children, and pillaging whatever the fuck you have. Instead, I'll sit on my ass and scope three miles circular and pray to God that some one younger than me prepped up a bit, and did some education, to take my place.
But I will not fuck over my neighbors. No matter how much I don't like them.
That'll work in the rural/semi rural areas The real question will be the urban areas.
SofaPapa:
Whenever the government is invloved with an element of compulsion, the effect of compulsion is to strip the virtue out of a transaction...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEM4NKXK-iA#t=00m48s
You're barking up the wrong tree. The issue is that we aren't being told to help less fortunate. Quite the opposite. In many places it is illegal to feed the needy or aid them at all. What we are given instead is an obligation to share earnings with the government so that it could then distribute them the way it sees fit.
The government wants you to be gratuitous, as long as the money goes though them. They want you to pursue justice, but god forbid taking matters into your own hands. Let them do the beating, expropriating, appropriating, repatriating and so on.
100% agreement with you that government acting to make illegal the human instinct for direct charity is an abomination.
And this is what I was trying to get at above: direct charity versus third-person charity. I find it far more natural when people help people than when people help causes. Government wants not only for there to be only third-person charity, but they want to be the only third-person allowed to decide where that charity goes. At least churches allow people to choose to give or not. Government eliminates all choice. They. Are. It. That's their goal, and it is evil. Doubly so when with one hand they create dependency while with the other they slaughter millions in the name of "fighting for human dignity". There is no word for this but evil.
the world is shit and we are all fucked and then we die
the world is shit and we are all fucked and then we die
and thats the good news
1) This guy's history is REALLY fucked up. You can confirm in an hour of internet time that the working class was very badly done by in the late 19th century and early 20th. Corporations ran everybody's lives, and didn't bother to try to hide it the way they do now. If you think that's an improvement you're dreaming.
2) It's also ridiculous to think that we could go back. In those days industry was expanding at an insane rate, and the population was far smaller than it is now. The "golden years" (if you can really call them that) of industrialism are over. Expensive energy and shortages of damn near everything mean far fewer jobs with an enorous global population... the problem of having more people than we can possibly keep busy is going to get worse, not better.
The question is: how do we ethically deal with it? I have a sick feeling a lot of you think a culling of the working class is in order, because that's what you seem to be calling for. Take away the welfare state and you're not going to have free human beings working together towards a better tomorrow, you're going to have millions of people right here in the US simply starving to death. There's never going to be enough jobs to go around, at least not enough jobs you can live on.
Now here's my challenge for all of you who are going to downvote me or call me an ignorant fuckwad: when you respond, either tell me that you are in favor of mass starvation or present me with a VIABLE way of removing the welfare system and avoiding said mass starvation.
The Real Bills Doctrine and gold coins bitch. :-)
Sashko
You're an ignorant fuckwad. Stop eating, that will be your contribution against avoiding mass starvation.
Straw man argument all the way. The collectivist state is not about to be turned off as if by a switch. What absurd thinking. However to begin reversing the galloping trend toward a one world surveillance welfare state in favor of the individual is the only course to save us from permanent servitude. Probably too late for that so you needn't worry.
So you're a government lover and government creates untenable conditions for the masses. Did you ever consider that you and your ilk are actually the problem?
Things are shitty all over the world precisely because of the existence of government, not its absence.
Hehe... funny. The comments were just about what I expected. Couple things:
1) First and foremost: not a single person answered my question. What do you all propose to do about all the people who can't get a job because there simply aren't enough of them? If you think that there will EVER be enough jobs for the present population you are badly deluded.
2) Believe it or not, I'm an anarchist. But in the present circumstances anarchy is not a realistic goal; we're simply too far down the rabbit hole. In truth I believe that it's too deep a hole to climb out of and there will be no non-catastrophic solution. The above is mostly a thought exercise. I'm realy very interested to see what ZH readers really think can/should be done in a world with way more adults than productive jobs.
3) I don't think that it's possible to have industrialism without oligarchic control. All the isms that have been proposed to fix it, including capitalism, are hopelessly fucked. Here's another thought exercise for all you anarcho-capitalists out there: how do you propose to prevent wealth from being leveraged into power?
None of the things you are talking about would exist without the ruling class that creates and owns government. As an anarchist, you would also be aware that there's no such thing as too far gone in terms of what is possible. To believe that government is inevitable and eternal is the opposite of anarchy.
Human groups are evolving past hierarchy largely because technology has made deprivation obsolete. It is only a matter of time until the very concept of authority is also obsolete. And without authority, the use of force becomes immoral and people will not accept the myraid crimes against themselves that comprise the industrial state.
There is no working class when people are not organized into slave groups by despots.
Technology has made deprivation obselete? You don't seriously believe that, do you?
There are no shortages of anything anyone needs. Why do we still have deprivation?
We produce 2700 calories of food per person per year worldwide, and could be producing that amount and more sustainably were it not for massive meat production to feed developed markets. The fact that meat production is so high, and that even the current abundance results in malnutrition, is a consequence of agribusiness and capitalist speculative markets in food.
Wow behold the statist, maybe even a Bolshevik. Yep them soviets were a well fed society without all those evil meat eating capitalists. Let them eat gruel. They were better off, fucking kulaks.
You sure you're at at the right website comrade?
In Soviet Russia, farm animals eat capitalists...
I'm not a believer in Bolshevik state capitalism; my view is that large enterprises should be managed on lower levels councils elected by their workers, with a board composed of differing proportions of shareholders and workers (large, established enterprises having the least shareholder representation). In essence, it is a more completely applied version of German co-determination laws in which workers have representation on corporate boards, which have done nothing to hamper German economic success.
As for meat-eating: most of our agricultural production, a plurality of water use, and a significant proportion of our energy and fossil fuel resources go into producing meat, particularly red meat which is most injurious to public health. Our planet and health are suffering so why should not animal agriculture be regulated? The reason it is not is the farm lobby and the general tendency of capitalism to create artificial scarcity where none need exist.
Newsflash! The people that run your country DON"T GIVE 2 SHITS about you or starving people in the world. While 100's of 1000's of people were out of work, underemployed, and about to have their health insurance STOLEN from them by their government, our beloved leader and CONgress were feasting like kings and queens:
http://schiller-wine.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-wines-and-food-at-presiden...
Wake Up!
I agree with many of your points. It is obvious that the great majority of libertarians and fans of "Austrian" economics have never read anything but modern libertarian political material and Austrian economics. One evening with Dickens (you know, reading about "Scrooge" or David Copperfield) should be enough to teach them that their dreams of some world in which free markets make everyone happy are nothing but silly pipedreams, no more or less utopian and outrageous than the fantasies of Marxists. No "natural" order is going to create some great world for people to live in. People are, by nature, evil and will always seek to dominate others for their own benefit. You cannot just get rid of this because you think it should be different.
That being said, the author is correct. Government is very dangerous, as the founding fathers of the U.S. understood. The disbursement of welfare, in all of its forms, including Social Security, has made the government even more dangerous and throws a lot of fuel onto the fire of totalitarianism. No one dare stand against the government since the welfare of so many depend upon it.
Welfare of some kind is clearly necessary. Bismarck understood this and is not the fool that Austrians make him out to be. Under his direction, after all, Germany rose to become the one of the two pre-eminent powers in the world, rivalling England. Starving people do not make good subjects. Without a poor law, you are going to have chaos, continuous revolt. This is where socialism came from in the first place: from the barricades in 1830, 1848, and 1860. It was a reaction against the Laissez-faire world of the industrial elite who were exploiting the working-class to become excessively wealthy. Bismarck was wise enough to reconcile these competing interests, and all of Germany benefitted.
However, modern history has taught us that central governments cannot be trusted with welfare collection or distribution. Welfare must be handled at a more local community level and by agencies far removed from the levers of power. In establishing local community control over welfare, no one group of people gains the incredible power that the larg-scale accumulation of money for poor relief entails.
The solution to the need for welfare is in separation of power and disbursement of this power to regional and local agencies. Something the founding fathers of the U.S. would have understood perfectly.
You have simply recounted all the evils of "government". And you came up with the answer that we just need more of the same thing that caused the problem in the first place.
The founding fathers of the U.S. also recounted all the evils of government and then set out to create one. The solution to the problem of government was, for the founding fathers, to be found in Montesquieu and the separation of power between legislative, judicial, and executive. So fearful of government were the founding fathers that they further divided power between the federal, state, and local governments.
What I am saying is that Montesquieu was wrong. There is a 4th power of government: welfare, and it is a power. It has always existed, in the form of Noblesse Oblige in medieval Europe, the grain stores of ancient Egypt, the distribution of gifts among Amerindian tribes. Wherever you look in history, whatever form human government has taken, it has always had to take on responsibility for welfare.
What I am saying is that disbursement of this power is the key to limiting it, just as the founding fathers of the U.S. understood.
The grain stores of Egypt were open to anyone that had something to trade, it wasn't a soul kitchen.
"whatever form human government has taken, it has always had to take on responsibility for welfare"
By "responsibility" you mean used as a political tool to keep the masses in line. How incredibly benevolent of them...
As a democratic socialist, I can agree with this sentiment. The federal government should ideally deal only with inter-state commerce, national defense and currency, research and development, interstate internal improvements, weights and measures, and the like. Social programs can and should exist but must be dealt with at the state and local levels with the federal government providing oversight to ensure that needed services are in fact distributed.
Anarchy has regularly lead to improved living standards.
Burn the assets of the oligarchs and equalize poverty.
The survivors will in the enviable economic state of a Bantu herder.
Right up until the point when a centralized state, with an organized military conquers your little anarchy and forces everyone to recognize the authorty of the state at the point of the sword or the barrell of a gun. Wishing the world were different than it is will not make it so. We have to live in reality. Government is a reality. The question is how to limit the power of government over its citizens. This was the preoccupation of the U.S. founding fathers. Let us return to their example, but let us remember, that these were reasonable men, who lived in the real world, not fantasy worlds of their own creation.
They were not reasonable men. King George didn't send troops and ammo to deal with reasonable men. History is not made by reasonable men.
One thing's for sure, you're a pompous arrogant fuckwad who is very impressed with himself. I wonder what sort of personal pile of assets you're sitting on.
"a lot of you think a culling of the working class is in order, because that's what you seem to be calling for"
We're not calling for it, we're recognizing that the Oligarchs are calling for it.
We use a dry humor here...the cull is a foregone conclusion.
Take away the Welfare State and you have an immediate Zombie Nation...all those on welfare will rise up to destroy every single producer of their benefits.
There is NO way of removing the welfare system and avoiding mass starvation: hence, the Zombies.
It really is that bad. There's no way around it, and you are going to die as a result. Me, too, most likely. And most of the rest of the fat fucks posting on Zero Hedge. Take consolence in that. But you, and I, will die.
FFS - I might have put on a couple of lbs but c'mon. Did you hack my webcam?
While I accept I'm gonna die - it won't be because of some culling - only the good die young.
To quote Geore Clooney from Dusk till Dawn
"I don't give a damn about living or dying anymore; all I care about is taking as many as those demons back to hell as I can."
You could remove the welfare system over the long term by requiring the sterilization of everyone on welfare.
Absolutely. This will remove most of the Prison-Industrial Complex and the need for Militarized Police as well. So much to gain by ending the Federal Dysgenics Program.
And I'm not going to call you an ignorant fuckwad. You're on a personal journey of waking the fuck up. You will encounter 'what the fuck are they called?' rats up the ass (no, fucking gerbils!!), I'm the worst tin foil hat advoacate ever...but there really is a trail that you need to cover...nothing that we can tell you will make any sense until you do the dirt work...you would believe every word I told you up to now. Do the homework. diligently, I am a real financial professional, as my bio cliams, and a real human being, I am not your professor, ask me anything, really.
Do what China does when the SHTF.
Send everyone out into the fields to grow food to feed themselves and their dependents.
Tried and tested: it works.
P.S.
I can tell you're in the U.S. because you wrote "couple things".
In English, that would be "a couple of things".
lack of jobs? pay people to do nothing. some of them might sit around. others might use all of that free time to create on their own.
I'm in favor of that, actually. Guaranteed basic income might be the onyl way out of this rat trap.
" ... the problem of having more people than we can possibly keep busy is going to get worse, not better."
That's one thing you'll always find with hand-wringing liberals and socialists: they all believe in the "too many people" problem and global warming. "How are 'we' supposed to cope with 'them'?" he asks. It never occurs to him that having "too many people" isn't his "problem" to deal with.
Here's a clue 2handband: people lived on this fucking planet for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years without capitalism, without socialism and without your beloved welfare state. They built places to live, and they ate off the land. Nothing more is needed. No auto industry, no defence industry, and no "financial" (i.e., scam) industries. None of these is to the benefit of humanity. Nor is the welfare state, nor socialism of any kind. Socialism is every capitalist's wet dream, and if you think otherwise you're obviously still wet behind the ears and need to get some more decades under your belt.
I agree with your last paragraph absolutely, and that's what I want... the right to not participate in the money economy. But I also recognize that there is no way in hell they are going to let us have that.
Before WWI we had what was called the Real Bills Doctrine. Aka consumer good financed self liquidating credit, (credit that dissappeared when the bill matured and was paid off in gold coins from the sale of the urgently demanded consumer goods on which the bill originated) which served to finance the Wage Fund, which was all destroyed with the introduction of legal tender laws in 1909 by France and Germany (as real bills which represented credit had to mature into something superior aka gold/silver and not fiat debt currency).The destruction of the Real Bills Doctrine which seRved as the clearing house of the international gold standard, castrated the international gold standard and caused the great depression which caused the creation of the welfare state, by the state. Everyone should read the works of Professor Antal Fekete on real bills to understand this more in depth..
Sashko
Slava Rusi;)
i don't remember signing a $154k+ loan to pay for all their "free" stuff, do you?
http://usdebtclock.org/
Mass starvation is what the world has right now. Most of the population of the world scrapes by on barely subsistence wages while fat cat bankers, leftist "sensitive" social do gooders, and "captains" of industry line their own pockets.
Mass starvation is necessary so that Wall St. can have its yearly bonuses, and buy themselves the next model year's Ferrari or Porsche.
You come here to talk about ethics, 2handband, yet you are blind as to what goes on outside your little personal fantasy world. Out in the real world which is not the USA, or Western Europe, or select cities in Asia or Latin America, there is starvation, squalor, disease and contaminated water. All that exists to provide power to the few, at the expense of the many.
The welfare system is nothing but window dressing, purely temporary and unsustainable. Soon, the world will revert to its natural state, where men kill each other for a piece of bread. It is inevitable.
See my comment above. I don't actually believe for a second that there is any non-catastrophic way out of the hole we've dug ourselves.
Working in the fields to earn your daily bread would be catastrophe for you?
I don't want to work in the fields, being some sharecropper to a wall street banker.
Not at all... so long as the fields were mine and I had the right to opt out of the money economy.
Who is forcing Indian, African and Muslim women to have 8 children apiece? Who is forcing these men to have 3 wives? Google the global fertility map and compare it to the global IQ map. While I agree that the banksters create and nuture a whole lot of poverty, they are simply taking advantage of a pre-existing problem. When does personal responsibility enter into the equation?
As my high-IQ, White Christian mother always says,
"Don't breed 'em if you can't feed 'em."
Great piece
How about we privatize some of the assets of the gubmint, convert them equity, and disburse the shares to those in need in a one-time transfer. Rather than wealth redistribution, with .gov skimming off the top to grow ever larger (what its really all about after all...), try real capitalism and give people some ownership of income producing assets.
That's not how real capitalism works. If "people" en masse own the income producing assets, who's going to do the dirty work? Capitalism requires the majority to be dispossessed by it's very nature. If you doubt that ask yourself this and be honest: if everyone in the country got handed a million dollars, how many would go to work the next day? Would you? Our economy depends utterly on hundreds of millions of jobs nobody would do if they had a choice.
This is a very twisted notion of reality. How do you suppose you got to thinking this way in the first place?
Yes, I would. I would go to work and try to turn my million into more millions by purchasing more income generators.
That is capitalism.
We can convert all debt to equity, and treat welfare as a debt, and end the Keynesian experiment once and for all.
"That's not how real capitalism works. If "people" en masse own the income producing assets, who's going to do the dirty work? Capitalism requires the majority to be dispossessed by it's very nature."
Yes, which is why capitalists were behind socialism, both its theorists like Marx and its practitioners like Lenin. Deluded simpletons who still fall for the fairy tale think socialism was born on the factory floor. It wasn't. Its theorists and practitioners were funded by the Tribe on Wall Street and in the City of London to turn Christendom into the desolate wasteland it is today, and to keep the poor poor. I hardly need to remind you it achieved both objectives with flying colours.
It would probably surprise you to learn that in early America, when capitalism was at its purest, most businesses were small businesses. Therefore most people owned the fruits of their labor or were apprenticing so that one day, they could. This was by design as the founding fathers were very distrustful of corporations and in the early days of the country a corporate charter could only be granted by a special act of state legislation.
Capitalism is not a "boogeyman" represented by Goldman-Sachs. Capitalism favors free-markets and sustainable, privately owned small businesses.
Why not convert welfare programs into a Social Relief Trust based on the following:
There would be no need or desire for any other welfare program than these.
You can't have a non-welfare state otherwise people would revolt, oligarchs would be arrested, law and order would be restored, wars would end, you wouldn't be able to BTFD and the constitution would become the law of the land.
Like playin' a country song backwards.
I exist outside the welfare state. I recieve no assistance, yet have a large chunk of my earned income forcibly taken to pay for things of which I recieve no direct benefit.
I have had tens of thousands of dollars taken from me to pay for car insurance, of which I have used $0.00 in twenty years. The insurance company has said I should have been in multiple accidents by now, yet they are wrong. Even though they are wrong, I do not get my money back.
Between myself and my employers hundreds of thousands of dollars have been paid towards health insurance of which I have used less than $10,000 over the past twenty years. That $10,000 represents about $2000 in real cost if it were not for the medical industry markup enabled through the insurance complex.
I paid property taxes yet had to pay to have the bees living in the city owned utility pole exterminated because repeated calls got me nowhere. When the pothole on the street went months without being filled I bought filler and fixed it myself.
Without welfare, both for the poor and the rich, people would have to live like me. Create something of real value using actual labor and sell it for a reasonable price.
My mind, hands, and skills create new products people need. I make the world better by providing better ways to perform tasks. I create products that bring people joy. I also create products that help keep people safe, preserving life. Real value.
Yet I get screwed over almost every day because the welfare state tries to destroy self sufficiency because it is a threat.
"Without welfare, both for the poor and the rich, people would have to live like me. Create something of real value using actual labor and sell it for a reasonable price."
Wow. Just wow. You people really believe that there's enough work of that nature to go around, don't you? There's not. And there never will be.
It's called growing food.
first give everyone enough farmland because right now it all belongs to landlords like the queen
second - we will need the same access to fuel as saudi king has - every farmer deserves to have his own oil well
You don't want to own the land;you just want the fruits of your own labour.
Food is fuel.
you never worked land in your life, did you ?
would you rent me your land for free for several years ?
how much land could you work without machinery ? how competitive would that be with someone who has tractors, fertilizers etc ?
You don't know shit..I am still pastoral farming at age sixty.
Why do you need it for free?
Sun, air and rain (your principal inputs)are all free.
What has competition got to do with it?
You are trying to feed yourself and your family.
You got it. I'm no farmer but I'm rural enough that I get well over half of my family's food from either our own garden or bartering with neighbors. There's no pesticides involved and the only machine would be the tractor that my brother in law uses to haul cattle feed. Push come to shove - we would be fine without the retail half. And we're not some commune, just using some common sense and enjoy getting dirty to grow fresh food.
I also think that the majority of American city dwellers have lost the knowledge of how to cook. Especially the 'poor'. Give me the money that a family of 4 spends for one meal at McDonald's or KFC and I'll feed my same 4 for a week.
so you wanna be a landlord and force the peasants to work for you. that's your world ?
give everyone fair share of Earth resources and then they will be happy providing for themselves by themselves
debugas, define "fair share", otherwise your speech is insane, (my bet you cannot describe :fair share).
Sorry
Sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about -landlords, peasants? Every one in my area is an independent free person. We just happen to all share a sense of community that includes a work ethic and attitude that we aren't buying into the consumer society. Doesn't mean we all even like each other - just don't want to be caught up in the iNeed things.
pay people, then let them make their own work. as it is, this entire layer of governmental 'oversight'/interference which is built into the 'welfare state' is the real problem. give needy people money, but leave them to their own devices as well. no more paperwork, social workers, etc.
.
Individual morality has nothing to do with this situation. This economic question is not a moral issue whatsoever. To believe otherwise is a legacy of the false Christianity that infests much of what passes for discourse about human societies to this day.
This is a question of incentive. When people are allowed to pursue their own interests and keep the value of their own labor, things settle into a natural order. When the fruit of your labor is confiscated from you, you are dis-incentivized away from constructive endeavors and toward finding alternative means of survival.
The "work ethic" is not applicable to a system where thieves print their own money. It also does not apply to a situation where every peasant can afford a television and cell phone. We are so far beyond scarcity that all the old institutions are obsolete and need to be replaced. Our system of morals needs updating too.
Morals have been corrupted by the state into a code of slavery. We have been divided into worthy and unworthy poor by our masters. We need to get control of this essential human institution back from the central planners.
The problem with most of these 'programs' is that they do work in a hard working society that only needs to use them on a temporary basis. The problem is that they have become 'permanent' and 'generous' and 'easy to qualify for'.
Very true. A relative of my wife in Italy has 2 sisters that are nuns working in Africa. She asked them can't you implement the farming and other modern practices. She said they are not allowed too.
"there were free market solutions..." - Oh year people dieing of hunger
The General Axiom of Government #1: "Government is nothing more than a criminal syndicate of violence, theft, destruction, and death. All statements otherwise are lies."
The General Axiom of Government #2: "Being nothing more than a criminal syndicate, government can only produce 4 things: Poverty, misery, death, and lies. All statements otherwise are lies."
The General Axiom of Government #3: "Being nothing but a criminal syndicate, government always accomplishes the opposite of the stated goal, as the stated goal is always a lie."
The General Axiom of government #4: Being nothing but a criminal syndicate concerned only with stealing and killing under cover of the lie of providing services, government must always monitor and control the thoughts, attitudes, behavior, and speech of their victims, subjects.
Summary: Government can only provide warfare, and never welfare.
The banksters need to repay us.
Visit any VA hospital for confirmation.
"Great Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries is an historical case study in how many of these problems were handled without political intervention in the private affairs of society."
Talking to older people in the UK there are some that can still remember when the poor could not afford to see a doctor.
If their condition was bad enough they just died.
We should remember that the state initially comes into being to protect the interests of the wealthy.
With records of land ownership and private property and a legal system to enforce these things.
The state also needs to fight wars primarily to enrich the wealthy and protect their land and property at home.
The poor get no benefits from new lands and resources if the war is won and just get a new boss if the war is lost. The new boss being pretty much the same as the old boss.
European history shows that in the days before a strong state is established the rich keep fighting each other over land, property and wealth.
With no big state in the US your best course of action, for maximum profit, would be to put together a private army and go to war against the biggest land owning family in the US.
Exactly! Extolling the virtues of 19th century British economic society is ridiculous.
The freedom to spend your money as you choose.
After Western market reforms the vast majority of Russians were left destitute but with this Western freedom.
They chose Putin.
A big function of the welfare state is to ensure the poor don't rise up and over-throw the rich (eg French and Russian revolutions).
The poor are always many and the rich are few, if the poor are treated badly enough they will rise up and over-throw the system.
In Europe we still have many old money families who just inherit wealth that flows down the generations and don't bother with that vulgar work stuff.
The US with it's Clinton/Bush oligarchy seems to be heading the same way.
When you have rich, old money families who want to hold on to their position at the top you need a welfare state.
The catch 22 is that by ignoring the poor, nations reduce demand and so saboutage their economies. The solution seems to be that states should issue sovereign debt, which is interest free and does not need to be repaid, to the sick, the elderly and the poor to maintain demand in the economy. This is what has occurred in China and is the reaason for the Chinese economic miracle.All that needs to happen for it to be used in the west is for the right to create money to be returned to the people (Which is where Thomas Jefferson says it should rightly be anyhow)
"Chinese economic miracle"? I'd say the jury is still out there. they're looking at a collapse themselves
The west says that China is looking at a collapse. However for a collapse to occur requires banksters to be in control of the money supply, which they over inflate and then cut off. Without this occurring there will be no crash. In China the state can cancel non performing loans, stimulate demand by giving all civil servants a 60% pay rise (which they recently did) and provide interest free loans to finance new projects, all of which does not happen when banksters are in chanrge of the money supply.
Europe will be just another police state soon.
With an EU military funded by debt.
And Europeans will be slaves to that debt.
There are no utopias.
I live near Detroit and have gone Ghetto Biking in the city.
There are people who treat the homeless like pets. They’ll setup BBQ grills and cook hot dogs for them and everything else. It’s weird.
The homeless here are worse than housecats.
society is commiting suicide in the west. insanity is the norm -as insane sociopaths gain more and more power as they use .gov to attack the sane. this insanity is best now seen in the Law.. which is used to create "rights"
such as homosexual rights, persons of color" rights "vs just personal rights of all..which put chains on non approved behavior of the sane.
remember homosexual behavior was long classified as a mental illness. this is a small point not one i would bother with (sexual activity is a small part of an ave persons life), but it shows very clearly the state is making mental illness into a "right" resulting in advocating for insane actions of transgenders and same sex marriage.
remember crime is the actions of the insane, who see their needs are above the victims needs, in .gov and banking we have reached the ultimate preditors on man. working with the force of law.
in this system an individual act of charity becomes a crime.
nowadays babies (and their mothers) rarely die in chilbirth, and most western people don't really die at 60 any more. modern medicine and technology has thrown all the old paradigms out the window. this topic needs population factored in.
GOVERNMENT JOB = WELFARE = PARASITE
the difference is the government job gets paid more, gets a pension and retirement benefits while WASTING TAXPAYER $$$
from the top down GOVERNMENT consists of mental and moral midgets wanting to control others.... congress is a septic tank of shit eating scum that has to be brought back to understand they are useless and simply a tool for siphoning off taxpayer money to the crony schemers and the parasites
look at obama... a shit eating maggot who was selected before he was "elected" based on his willingness to eat shit and do what he is told regardless of how stupid it makes him look... or the consequences to the nation..
like the joke goes.... the asshole trumps the brain and runs the body
the asshole clamps up and after a few days the brains cant function and concedes... ok asshole, you are in charge.... in the case of corporare amerika they can set up offshore and wait it out... the average person is fucked...
Wow, this article is the very essence of historical amnesia. The institutions you describe arose because people were literally starving to death in the streets. Yes, the free market eventually came up with solutions because the human suffering was so extraordinary. Yet you have only to read works like Oliver Twist or How the Other Half Lives or The Jungle to know just how woefully inadequate the private sector response was. Similarly during the Great Depression, soup kitchens were there and bread lines existed, but they were powerless to meet the great need of people. Hunger and deprivation were profound. Today, we have a robust welfare state and though real unemployment is higher than it was at the nadir of the Depression, we don't see nearly the same suffering.
This is my problem with you libertarians. You argue that the free market can theoretically provide all solutions. Yet history proves how wrong your theory is.
Since nobody seemed to understand my previous comments I'm just going to start over. It's very simple, really.
1) The period the author is canonizing was actually horrendous for the working class. This is easy to verify for yourself.
2) Even if that waasn't true, these days are not those days. Any discussion of this without population being added as a factor is incomplete and stupid.
3) What's happened over the past 150 years is that we've been herded onto a giant collective labor prison. We're stuck in a money economy we have no way to opt out of. In ancient Rome there were communities called monasteries. These were not religious institutions; they were isolated communities created by people who didn't want to participate in the mainstream of Roman society. They were left alone; they didn't even have to pay taxes. Try doing that now... you will be declared a cult. they will set fire to your buildings and shoot you as you run out of the flames.
4) The above problem is not a function of government. It is a function of captitalism... unless you really believe that government tells corporations what to do and not the other way around. If you do believe that we probably have nothing to talk about. Truth is that government is the enforcement arm of big business. If government wasn't there, they'd just be hiring private armies and still controlling the labor by force. If you think this would be any better you are delusional.
5) Welfare is heavily misrepresented. The actual numbers are very different from the media hype. A picture is being painted of a bunch of black people sitting around doing nothing while collecting a monthly government check... the reality is very different. 92% of welfare recipients in America are either disabled or... wait for it... working. That's the dark, dim reality of it... there are no working class jobs that anyone can actually live on. A fucking assistant manager at Wal Mart qualifies for food stamps in the state in which I live. No one who is working should qualify for food stamps.
6) We're not coming back from this. There are not enough jobs to go around that pay a living wage, and there's never going to be. This is the elephant in the room that nobody here seems to want to address. Everybody just keeps coming back around to "those lazy bastards need to go work"... doing what, i ask you? Most of them ARE working... and they still need welfare to survive. Unless and until there are enough good-paying jobs to go around OR we're given the option to opt out of the money economy, this will not change. I ignored the second option in my above comments because it will not happen.
7) Regarding the second option: I have a degree in anthropology (which has never earned me a penny, BTW... I'm a musician by trade). My greatest and most unattainable fantasy is to see society reorganized along tribal lines. Humans seem to function best in small, politically autonomous societies... 150 people seems to be about the maximum. In our culture we're taught to identify with the wealthy and envy them. I identify with the Indians, and we want the land back! Seriously... give me and mine enough land that we can live off it WITHOUT intensive farming and then leave me the fuck alone. However, unlike a depressing number of you that think your fantasy is realizable, I recognize that there is ZERO chance of this taking place.
8) So we have to live with the situation we're stuck with. How do we make it tolerable. I mean make it voluntary and enjoyable for everybody, not just a privileged few? I don't think we're going to succeed, but we need two mechanisms: first to make sure that everyone has their basic survival needs met. My favorite solution (giving everyone land) will not happen, so what next? Most of you seem to be opposed to increasing wages (which won't happen either BTW). Failing those two things, we either give them handouts or let them starve. There isn't an option 3.
9) The second mechanism we need is one to prevent wealth from becoming power. Any ideas?
Bottom line: I think we're fucked. If there's one conclusion I took away from my study of anthropology, it's that the agricultural revolution came 30,000 years too eary... and it's a conclusion I didn't really arrive at till i was long out of school. I don't think we're ready for large, complex societies, and I think we've only scratched the surface for ways to design them badly. I think it's going to be one form of bullshit tyranny after another until humans get smarter or somebody pushes the red button. I'm expecting the latter to come first. But seriously, before you junk me, answer the questions I asked above. Lacking the welfare state how do we prevent mass starvation in the developed world (and please don't say put them to work until you can tell me what work they'd be doing and it had better pay a living wage), and how do we prevent wealth from becoming power? I think once you carefully consider that last question you start to come to the conclusion that we're fucked.
I think it is interesting that there are calls here for the bankers to pay us back, for the accumulated wealth of the super rich to be redistributed, but not much support for a guaranteed minimum income.
The theft has been enormous. Theft through inflation and taxation has impoverished the masses to the benefit of the super rich.
Just since 1980 there has been about 185% inflation/loss of purchasing power.
There is no way to reasonably calculate the individual losses for each person/family.
We just need to jettison the BS government bureaucracy of patchwork programs (SNAP, SS, TANF, etc.) and give U.S. citizens a card with a dole amount on it.
All the money goes back into the economy and rolls uphill to the top. If the evil bastards are concerned that it won't come back to them fast enough unused funds could "expire" in 90 days or some such.
As much as the US imports you would think even our trading partners would be all for the dole and a built in demand for their products.
"Lacking the welfare state how do we prevent mass starvation in the developed world"
I believe Gulag work camps, forced sterilization and coercive population reduction are all solutions you haven't considered. According to many accounts, the powers that be are setting up the infrastructure to enact those very measures soon. War has also been a very popular tool, historically. You just send all the troublemakers off to die.
"how do we prevent wealth from becoming power"
Are you asking how to prevent someone in a tribe from gathering all power to himself, using it to put everyone under his dominion, hoarding all resources to himself, stratifying society into a myriad of unequal classes, forcing them all to fight with one another and then imposing this twisted model on all the surrounding tribes? You don't. That's Babylon.
In the Christian understanding, Satan rules all the kingdoms of the world. If you bow the knee to him, you'll rise. If you don't, he'll hunt you down and crucify you. There's no getting around it on this side of death. Sorry.
(That's actually not true. There is a "strait and narrow" path through all this mess that Jesus talks about at length. Too bad no Christians understand it though.)
We have a welfare state for sure. The richer you are the more welfare you get. If you are a corporation or a bank you can get hundreds of billions.
All this and yet all the talk is about food stamps. Pathetic.
hundred of billions eh champ?
LMMFAO you fucking retard.
You got a point there tyler (bot), just don't shave your head and no one will notice.
Two words: Coxey's Army.
who'd a thought we were in a perfect state of being in the second half of the 19th century, not Charles Dickens apparently. All this before public police forces and at the dawn of insurance offered as the societal solution to welfare for those that could afford insurance; and with the money as debt system really starting to come into it's own with such technological advancements as the mass production of steel finally being realized, electrical production, the development of the safety cartridge, bolt action rifles and machine guns, the dawn of radio and television communications and the internal combustion engine on the very near horizon....so this article draws conclusions from much too narrlow a perspective.
Are you seriously defending the money-as-debt system? The same one that made possible the extermination of Indians, countless ruinous wars in Europe, conversion of the state to a mere instrumentality of a banker elite, creation of joint-stock companies whose owners did not work them, the driving of countless farmers off of formerly royal lands? Industrial development could have been achieved much more sustainably without any of these.
The free market was not dependent on the welfare state, but free market capitalism was.
That's true. Open and competitive markets (I refrain from using the term "free" due to its appropriation by believers in capitalism) have existed since long before capitalism began in 1600s colonization and will continue long after capitalism becomes too unsustainable for our environment to support.
Capitalism is nothing more than an ownership model based on the belief that holders of equity in an enterprise ought to control it, not workers. Historically, it was workers who controlled businesses (farms, shops, and the like, were all worked by their owners) and marketed their products more or less freely. It was only when the aristocracy began to invest money in imperialist ventures in the 1600s, bought up formerly royal lands in the 1700s, and financed industrial enterprises in the 1800s that capitalism became the dominant mode of life for most people in the world.
The welfare state, a 1900s invention, was created to paper over the fundamental contradiction in capitalism - the debt-backed, privatized money system that means that pre-existing financial wealth is better at attracting new wealth than labor, even though labor is fundamentally required to produce new goods and services. Moreover, all money in existence is borrowed and must be paid back at interest to private banking houses. Were it not for these two facts, the welfare state could be much reduced in size, as could the military. Interest payments on national debt, and the debt itself, would plunge to zero.
As the Lowell Mill Girls said:
The truly disabled, mentally and physically disabled we can foot the bill for.
Everyone else pays their own way. Fully.
Just out of curiosity, Mr. Loudmouth, how are you "paying your way" these days?
Pig farmers fear the presence of these Randite Libertarians more than Hog Cholera. With Libertarians around if a holy man should come by and cast out their Libertarian "principles", farmer's whole herd would jump off a cliff and drown in Rand’s Lake of Semen.