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8.29.2003
Pop Quiz! I draw the majority of my income from: a) the wages I earn from my labor b) interest I earn off of investments, rents and ownership. -------------------------- Most of us will answer "a" despite a few of us having a little money in some form of interest bearing investments. But can you really quit your job and still have enough money to live? Do you find the idea of life without a job unfathomable? You are a worker. Plain and simple. No matter how well you live, your livelyhood is dependent on your wages. If you lose your job you must find another. Your position as a worker, despite being in the clear majority amongst the people in this country makes you practically invisible to the eyes of the government and the powerful people that control policy. Our ability to make a living is derived from whether or not investors see an oppurtunity to make money from what they own. When they don't see oppurtunity they hold their capital and we suffer through recessions and layoffs. Only when conditions are ripe again for profit to be derived from investment will we be employed. These conditions are promised by our politicians who say they will "fix the economy". What this usually means is that worker desperation has to rise and wages have to drop; new markets are created by new technology or new consumers become available. Profit = selling price - (cost of labor) - (cost of raw materials). When I say "this is class warfare" it relates to the above equation. The opening quiz tells you on which side of the equation you fall. Workers are considered cost of labor, and our wages are to be minimized to the greatest extent possible so that profit can be maximized. You can also see why environmental regulations are considered "bad for the economy", a phrase that ultimately means "bad for generating profit". Protecting the environment adds to the overall cost of raw materials. Keeping the above equation and your relation to it in mind while thinking about politics or economics makes understanding much simpler. Where you fall in ideologically usually depends on whether or not you consider giving owners greater and greater wealth a reasonable trade off for the wages you hope to earn by doing so. I call this the "king's men" philosophy. In the old days you could earn a pretty good living by helping the king maintain his power. If that meant that millions starved but you lived well because of your help in securing the king's riches you might think it was a pretty good system. Your advice to the starving? "Make yourself useful to the King like I have". This idea is prevalent in America today. We scramble to find a "well paying job" which usually ends up being pretty dirty work that in some way provides direct benefit to the owning class. Its not an over-simplification to say that our ability to make someone else money determines our overall worth. When you hear that "productivity has risen" but you are earning the same wage, it translates, your value has increased but it will not be passed on to you. thats all for now... | |
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