Capitalism has always, from its beginning, failed in a fundamental task: it failed
to provide meaningful work, even under its own terms of exploitation, for
everybody. It couldn't do it! Its own mechanisms mean, that when you even get
near to full employment, the position of workers bargaining for wages, allows them
to put to push the wages up, which makes the employer react by saying "well I'm
not going to pay you that higher wage, so I'm firing you. I'm not hiring you,"
plunging them back into unemployment. It's its own mechanisms, make a long
story short, that prevent the system from ever achieving full employment. It's always only a question of how many people will be unemployed, how bad will
it be, how long will it last, all of that, and the problem is that's not a viable
system. Why? Because people who are literally without work and therefore
without income, are going to have very little to lose, unless they quietly walk
off into the woods and die, which some do, but most won't, they are going to try to
find another way to exist, and they become the beggars, and they become the
thieves and they become the marauding gangs, whatever you want. So the system
has to come up with that, and so it invented, took centuries. It invented what
we nowadays call welfare, or the safety net, or of a whole variety of terms like
this, in which you basically say, not what kind of system leaves large numbers of
people bereft, and even if it pays them, pays them so little that they can't live,
we're gonna solve this problem by, let's see, taxing a bunch of money from those
who have it, in order to basically give it to these people so they don't make
trouble. We say to them: "Okay live over there, in a shitty part of town, but we'll
give you enough that you can, you can eat, we'll give you a food stamp, and we will
give you a section 8 voucher to live in public housing,
and we will give your kid a free breakfast at school if they qualify,
because we pay you so little that your life is miserable. and we'll, and that'll
be called if you blump it all together, a guaranteed basic income. Hmm...the rational
response to this would be, wait a minute, why do we have a system that creates
this thing? We don't do that! We dare not ask those questions in our culture. So, we
have basic income, welfare charity, whatever you want to call it, to keep
these people going. But, no sooner do you do this, then you set up a struggle: all
the people who have money, a job, income, they're gonna have to now be taxed to
raise the money to take care of the people on the basic income. They don't
want that. They worked hard for their money. Don't take it from me! Every
right-wing jerk in any culture, has always seen a great opportunity here, to
deal with the anger of those one step above those on welfare, who don't want to
be told you have to pay for. Of course, the answer for the masses would be: "make
the rich pay," and the rich understand this all too well, which is why they buy the
politicians to make sure that's not the way it's done, and then they make sure
that the way they escape their share of taxation, is to set the workers against
the unemployed, in an endless, horrible fight that often leads to violence, and
that leads to social conflict, and that leads to Brexit votes, and to Trump
elections, and all the rest. Two years ago a French economist then Thomas Piketty
writes a famous book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," 600 page book. His
book shows in every capitalism that the world has seen, any country, any time, you
let capitalism function, it creates an ever widening gap between rich and poor.
The only time that is constricted is when people rise up, like they did in the
1930s, and change it all out of rage about this thing.
And as soon as that rage passes, it's undone, like we undid the New Deal, and we
start to say, which we are now in the middle of, you know. So what's the
my response? We don't need, and we don't want, because it's socially destructive and
socially divisive, to have one group of people who work ,and another group of
people who don't. Give everyone reasonable work, and give everyone
reasonable pay. Our societies are being torn apart by struggles over
redistribution. do we take, and from whom, to give to those less fortunate, as if it
was a matter of fortune, rather than an economic system that doesn't work.
Redistribution tears societies apart. It's...here's the parallel: you're going
into the park on a Sunday afternoon, you're a married couple, you have two
children, one is six and one is seven, and you stop because there's a man
selling ice cream cones, and you give one of your children an ice cream cone that's got
four scoops, and the other one an ice cream cone with one scoop, and you
continue walking. Those children are going to murder each other: they're gonna
struggle. What are you doing? And don't then come up: "okay you've had,
you've eaten your, this part of your scoop, so give the other part of your
scoop to your sister or your brother." Stop! The resentment of the one who has
to lose his ice-cream or he,r you see where I'm going. Every parent who isn't a
ghoul, understands: give each child the same damn ice-cream cone,
two scoops each. You don't need redistribution, if you don't distribute
it unequally in the first place. Capitalism is congenitally incapable of
distributing equally.